


My Sun, My Stars, & the Whole of My Sky

by PrettyMissKitty



Series: the Old Guard - MISC. [3]
Category: The Old Guard (Comics), The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Awkwardness, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Canon-typical Cursing, Crusades, Cultural Differences, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Food as a Metaphor for Love, Gen, Getting Together, Historical Accuracy, Historical References, Introspection, Language Barrier, M/M, Misunderstandings, Mutual Pining, Religious Discussion, Religious Guilt, Slow Burn, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-19
Updated: 2021-03-02
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:00:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 27,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28282845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PrettyMissKitty/pseuds/PrettyMissKitty
Summary: Yes, it's yet another getting-together, Crusades-era fic. I don't understand how I can read 10+ billion of them and yet still want more fiercely enough to write my own, but here we are...This one comes with Historical Accuracy and Extensive Research Notes!
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Series: the Old Guard - MISC. [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1907041
Comments: 33
Kudos: 70





	1. Starting on the Path of Destiny

**Author's Note:**

> We're starting of 2021 the right way with a brand-new, massively multi-chapter, mutual pining Crusades Era Immortal Husbands getting-together fic! (and we're ignoring how the outside world is still kinda going to hell... but it's like the 90's, that decade didn't end until at least 2006, soooo 2021 doesn't start until at least February, right?)
> 
> I've got a pretty good buffer for this story, so I should be successfully able to update every week on Tuesday!
> 
> Now, the research notes are actually too long to be fit into the Author Notes text box, so I'm just gonna tack them onto the end here. IF you have any questions or feel that my representation of a culture / identity / religion / etc is not accurate or something, please feel free to let me know! I strive to accurately represent all aspects of my characters and their world, but even with a heavily academic background in such things I still make mistakes. ^_~

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Joe and Nicky start out as starry-eyed hopefuls just trying to do right in their world... Things do not go well.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I should have both PoVs in each chapter as we move forward here, but there won't ever be too much overlap in the perspectives. They'll mostly be viewing separate events just a little skimming over an important point if both of them are present for it! XD
> 
> This first chapter doesn't have much cuteness in it, or even any real interaction between them, but I promise that it's coming! I'm a sucker for it, after all! ^_~

** Chapter 1: Starting on the Path of Destiny **

**|| NICKY ||**

For as long as he could remember, Nicolò di Genova had been a man of God.

Even as a young boy, with no comprehension of any true hardships of the world, Nicolò had found solace and inspiration within the majestic rituals of Church.

As the youngest child of a fairly significant noble of Genoa, the fifth son of seven children with features as delicate as his sisters’, Nicolò was well educated by some of Genoa’s greatest scholars and doted upon by the entire household. He was instructed in Latin and Greek and even one variety of the merchant Arabs’ tongue. He received lessons in literature, art, and mathematics as well as sword-training, dancing lessons, and archery and music instruction. His interest in ecclesiastical studies was not only indulged, but broadly encouraged— particularly when he showed promise with being able to maintain the stillness, silence, and studious mindset necessary for a priest.

Nicolò formally joined the clergy when he was ten years old, serving first as an alter boy and then as a fully instituted acolyte when he relinquished all his earthly ties to serve His will among the most wretched of His children. He was fully ordained as a priest by his 20th year and spent his days proving aid and solace to Genoa’s poor out of the Duomo di Genova, San Siro[1].

Attending the Archbishop directly, Nicolò became a priest of considerable prominence at a fair swiftness compared to many brothers of his Order. That swiftness caused the other brothers to like him rather less than optimal, but when Nicolò took his vows to rescind his bonds of familial blood, he was not given any expectation that his new brothers would truly act as a Family to replace the one he’d given up to take the cloth.

God was his Family now, and His children were Nicolò’s flock.

While he mourned the loss of such familial closeness, Nicolò found he didn’t truly mind the imposition of solitude all that much. He’d know love a plenty as a child, and while a piece of him yearned to feel such warmth again, it was simply part of his holy struggle to be tempted to crave more of a close connection to his brothers than was freely offered. Nicolò managed to best his own desires with an exertion of acetic masculinity[2] and settle fully into his new life.

Instead of allowing himself to wallow in the sinfulness of yearning, of wishing for things not automatically or freely given (even something so seemingly simple as a warm, familial connection to his new brothers), Nicolò focused on accomplishing his mission as a warrior of God’s good will on earth.

His role was to help Genoa’s people and Nicolò threw himself into his work.

He had ample strife to work at easing.

The Saracens[3] had been growing bolder over the last few decades, taking their piracy deeper inland and daring to attack larger targets. Various points along the coastline claimed by the port of Genoa had been sacked a dozen times a year, every year, since Nicolò was old enough to be afraid. His family had been fortunate, and powerful enough to ensure their own protection, but Nicolò knew that many families had lost everything.

He knew that many families _continued_ to lose everything.

It was the call of the Divine that lead him to take up this cause as his own, and using his significant position at the Archbishop’s right hand along the judicious press of his sparse words to secure resources for the victims he served, Nicolò was able to alleviate much of his city’s suffering.

He has spent the last ten years helping his people in the wake of the Saracen plague—sometimes even fighting off the pirate invaders himself using the long sword of Damascus[4] steel that Nicolò’s father had given him as one last gift to commemorate his filial piety upon formally tying his Fate to the cloth in being fully ordained.

The long sword, the Genoese knife[5] he’d received as a child upon his first communion, and the beautifully crafted Genoese crossbow[6] he’d received upon his Christian confirmation… three weapons of godliness and beauty, weapons he’d been trained for all his life to wield.

Each day Nicolò wakes and prays and helps his fellow man, sometimes by killing those who would harm the innocents, he feels a resonance with Divine and knows with utter certainty that the path he walks is the one his fate was meant to let him find.

His life is sparse and cold in some ways, as he has few close friends and fewer personal possessions, but it is rich and warm in others as he basks in the heady relief he inspires in those innocent, wholly devout people he can aid directly and as he pursues yet more knowledge of the world and how it can be helped.

His days are divided between handing out alms to the desperate, rations of food and woolen blankets and household goods, and mercilessly thwarting Saracen raids.

Nicolò grows evermore cool and calculated as his days drag on in Genoa. He doesn’t understand these Saracens, doesn’t understand how a whole culture of people could seemingly be arranged around the concept of taking what is not theirs to have.

He doesn’t understand how it seems like so many other people in this world seem content to simply let them continue to pillage instead of taking this fight to them

What Nicolò _does_ understand is that the Saracens have taken his God’s Holy Land away from the children who would worship Him in pilgrimage.

What Nicolò entirely understands is that when the Pope calls for the Milites Christi[7] to fulfill an even higher calling, Nicolò’s Faith and warrior skills could serve the Crusade[8] well— he understands that serving in the Crusade is to enact God’s will on earth in a broad sense that could inspire _millions_ of lost souls to find their way to the True Faith.

The day the Pope’s recruitment missive arrives, when the sermon calling all good Christians to arms to fight the encroaching plague of the heathen horde, Nicolò packs his bags.

Within a few weeks, he has made his pilgrimage to Rome and heard Mass at the Vatican. He has been blessed and pardoned by the Pope himself. There, Nicolò is soon given the heavily quilted chausses and gambeson provided by the Pope to his noble soldiers, and he’s fitted the material and the mail hauberk underneath a laminar chest plate gifted to him by his mother.

On top of all of it, he wears the white surcoat with the red cross of holy purpose as found in the flag that flies above the Duomo di Genova, a symbol of home and hope and divine agency emblazoned on his chest[9]. He has his long sword, his knife, and his crossbow. He is given a great sword to carry, as well. Nicolò is armed to the teeth, and already well-schooled in death.

He has a holy purpose and the Fateful guidance of the Divine.

A month later he’s on a well-appointed ship with another new band of brothers[10], of _brothers in arms_ , and they’re facing the desert where Jesus Christ himself once walked.

It’s a land that his people have been too long barred from by the threat of heathens.

Nicolò knows it in his bones that it is God’s will he be part of what makes this land, once more, clean and free and peaceful. He does not for a second question this conviction, never for a moment believes his vision and his inspiration might be false.

He does not even question it when he dies in the late hours on the final day of the siege.

This is the Path his God means for him to walk in glory.

\- - - - -

\- - - - -

**|| JOE ||**

Yusuf ibn Ibrahim ibn Muhammad ibn al-Kaysani was born into a merchant family in Tunis[11] while the city was under the full embrace of the Fatimid Caliphate.

He was raised to love art and music and stories from both near and distant lands.

Yusuf has spent his thirty-three years of life that Allah has graced him with, thus far, travelling and learning and _experiencing_ the full majesty of Allah’s miraculous kaleidoscope of Creation.

He has found many things, many people and places and pieces of art and poetry, that he loves with heartfelt depth. He has also found a few things he hates.

Ships crowded with sweaty, unwashed soldiers is one such thing that Yusuf has found he hates… As a merchant’s son, he shouldn’t be so seasick as he is, but the crush of his fellow soldiers— the others who have answered Governor Iftikhar ad-Duada’s call to arms to defend the Holy City of Jerusalem[12]— is enough to put a sick and cloying scent in the air.

And even after departing the ship, the situation for Yusuf does not improve.

Antioch is a large enough city, but it was never meant to host 17,000[13] soldiers in addition to its normal, civilian population— especially not when that population is bloated by refugees streaming in from stolen cities and razed country villages...

Life is cramped and uncomfortable and putrid, with awful smells, awful food, and the awful company of soldiers who’ve never been raised to know their own short-sightedness.

He does not want to be here, to be in Antioch or Jerusalem or any of these lands, at all.

But he also could not bear to leave.

He is here to defend the homes and holy sites of his people. He is here to avenge his father and brother, innocent merchants slain without provocation by Byzantine swords, for his eldest brother slain ten years earlier by blades dipped in Genoese greed. He could not even retrieve their bodies for proper funerary rites.

Yusuf had failed them and has resigned himself to never being able to correct that.

This is his penance.

Allah is merciful, and Yusuf’s dedication to His service would surely earn his father and his brothers their places in paradise despite Yusuf’s failure to perform the proper rites.

So, Yusuf will Serve.

And he will not complain aloud.

He will not dwell on how desperately his misses his mother and his sisters, or his youngest brother… How deeply afraid he is for the security of their futures.

He will not wallow in the ache of how much he misses the long days of studying at the knee of the masters collected by the University of Al-Azhar in Cairo[14].

He will not mourn the invaders he slays, no matter how well he knows that the lives of all humans are precious to Allah. The invaders, these self-righteous Franks and Byzantines, they come to these lands with hate in their hearts and seek little more than to sully the holy sites of Islam with their vicious, sanctimonious blood-letting.

Yusuf steels himself as the invaders set up camp, obscenely close to Antioch’s walls.

It’s a show of confidence that leaves the invaders vulnerable to skirmishes and even projectile attacks from Antioch’s walls. It’s clear they don’t mind the losses as more and more soldiers from the West arrive with every day that dawns.

Their people did not prepare for the might of Islam as they ought. Disease seems prominent, from what Yusuf can see, as well as the lethargy unique to starvation[15].

And yet, still the battle rages. The relentless tide of new arrivals from the West inevitably begins to drown the storm-tossed city.

Months roll on in the siege and Antioch’s own stores of food and water begin to dwindle.

The siege is a constant slaughter, on both sides[16].

Yusuf leads the men he has been entrusted with as well as he is able, and his men do sustain less-than-average losses while claiming twice as many invader lives as any other unit, but it is not enough.

He is proud of how he’s served his men. He is proud of all the invaders he has stopped.

But there are always more of the enemy arriving at each dawn, and always fewer of his own men surviving at each dusk… It wears on him terribly and he grows to hate the invaders with the ferocity of something utterly inhuman.

This war, and all its senseless slaughter, is their fault, _they_ brought this to the Empire’s[17] peaceful shores. This land they claimed as holy ground, that they believed they found holier than the people who currently held it sacred, is drenched in blood and viscera in their hateful ‘cleansing’ meant to purge it of those they consider ‘infidels’.

Yusuf screams that sentiment at the enemies he faces each time he engages in their senseless fighting.

He screams at them of Allah’s love and how their bloody, vicious God has no place inside the hearts of any man with civilized intentions.

They scream back.

Yusuf knows enough of their words to pick up bits of meaning in the language hurled at him in the cacophony of battle.

They snarl petty insults and low-brow slurs.

He replies with much more graphic and creative imagery.

And then, _months_ into the Siege[18] with the count of lives lost on either side too vast to even estimate, Yusuf knows the city is lost.

He wakes to the realization with sudden clarity, about mid-day.

By evening, when the invader force does finally withdraw for the night as darkness seeps into the field of battle, Yusuf knows the other defenders suspect that something has changed.

They do not realize what until the invaders are attacking them from within the city[19].

Yusuf helps organize the retreat to the Citadel.

He still loses nearly all the men he fights beside. Those of own command have all been killed before they reach the half-way mark.

And as he covers the final escape, holding the path for as long as possible, he spies an invader stepping just a bit more recklessly than others.

His armor is clearly good enough to make him feel confident in pushing harder than his fellows, and his bloodlust is more than evident in the stains on his once-white tunic.

Yusuf despises him with a ferocity beyond all reason, with a venom he has not felt before.

He shoves his bloody sword through his belt and picks up the bow of a fallen comrade—pulling an enemy’s arrow from his corpse. It’s not Yusuf’s smartest idea, but the gate to the Citadel is mere yards behind him and he desperately wants to kill this one last invader before he falls back into the dubious safety of the Citadel.

Yusuf takes aim at the one clear weak spot in the invader’s armor: the lose hang of the mail coif about his head, exposing just a sliver of his bare throat.

He draws and fires and _knows_ that he’s hit home. This invader will die coughing on his own lungs— swiftly enough to be surely dead, but slowly enough to make his suffering sufficient for Yusuf to revel in the righteous vindication.

But as the invader’s hand flies to his neck, he turns and spots Yusuf throwing down his borrowed bow. Their eyes meet and Yusuf freezes— stilled by an unknown force as the invader’s startlingly clear glass green gaze bores into his own.

Time appears to slow from Yusuf’s perspective.

The invader’s off hand drifts toward his back, pulls a cross bow around— already armed and primed to fire. The invader draws the heavy wooden object up to aim.

His fingers squeeze the trigger as he falls to his final rest.

The bolt flies across the distance between him and Yusuf— striking Yusuf in the gut, slightly to one side. Yusuf cannot believe the invaded _aimed_ to hit his liver, but he believes that he aimed to kill as certainly as a dying man could hope to aim for.

Yusuf’s last thoughts are jumbled. A prayer to Allah, full of something like relief. A flash of longing to see his family once more. And some chaotic strike of deep emotion resonating like a bell within him as fleeting images of perceptive green eyes fill his mind with glorious song.

And as this world goes dark, a final prayer of thanks to Allah flits across his tongue.

\- - - - -

**Historical Notes:**

> [1] San Siro, later re-named as the Basilica of St Syrus, was founded as Genoa’s primary roman catholic cathedral (and the seat of power for the Archbishop of Genoa) in the 5th or 6th century CE. It existed outside the main defensive walls of Genoa and would have been in the midst of being viciously and routinely ravaged by pirates (primarily of Middle Eastern origin) when Nicky would have been working there. The threat was so active at this time that by 1110 CE, moving the seat was indisputably necessary. The title of Duomo di Genova was transferred to San Lorenzo (consecrated in 1118 CE), but San Siro would’ve been called the Duomo at the time Nicky served there. I’ve made him a sort of warrior-priest / monk in the fashion of the Milites Christi, a pseudo-knighthood that was an ideal more than it was an organization but served as inspiration and precursor to the Knights Templar (founded 1119 CE). Nicky serves the victims of an area of historically prominent high piracy and he occasionally fends off direct pirate attacks on the church itself, honing his warring skills (and stoking a hatred of the ‘Saracens’) in a historically plausible manner that could dig deep-rooted feelings.
> 
> [2] The Christian Dogma at this point in time was so unbelievable retroflexed, man… I can’t even begin to explain it all here. We will be getting into the ridiculous details of it all as things move forward and specific points become directly relevant to Nicky’s internal struggles. There will be angst.
> 
> [3] ‘Saracens’ is an aggregate term for all Middle-Eastern looking persons in contact with the so-called ‘civilized’ Western World. It does not acknowledge any variance between Middle-Eastern cultures, nor any variance in creed of Islam (or other religions). It was coined by Europeans who could not be arsed to tell the difference between various non-western peoples and it’s a bit like Americans calling their various indigenous populations ‘the Indians’. It is a historically accurate term and Nicky is using it with an accurately racist and xenophobic mindset. His example here is not to be followed and I do not condone it (even Nicky will come to hate such generalized dismissiveness).
> 
> [4] ‘Damascus Steel’ is a particularly strong and beautifully patterned variety of worked Wootz Steel, imported to the Near East from southeast Asia (it’s basically invincible, swords from the Crusades era can still hold an edge that can slice through a woolen habbard and leather laminar like butter, and bend with over 30 degrees of flex without snapping, to this day). Damascus steel _was_ imported to places like Venice, Rome, and Genoa from the 5th century CE up to the 1700’s CE, though most crusader swords were of far lower quality. Most Damascus steel weapons were curved, Eastern weapons, but there are examples of such steel being worked into Italian ‘broad’ rapiers (more on that below). Nicky is the son of a wealthy noble in a State gaining power, it is a reasonably plausible gift.
> 
> [5]Genoese knives are really cool. They kinda look like awkward kitchen knives and are used in a very unique fencing style that is particular to the Genoa school; a hyper-aggressive, whirling sort of dual-wielding with a long sword that is essentially a fat, broad fuller rapier (prior to the introduction of the word rapier into swordcraft lexicon), about 2~3 inches across and 34~36 inches long, delineated from a long sword by the consistently narrowing grade between its hilt and its tip (most long swords have nearly straight lines from the hilt down to a triangular bend into the tip). In the Movie, Nicky has a two-handed, fat, triangular thing I think is a Frankish greatsword (admittedly I’m not as well versed in that particular weapon as I am in other elements of this history). He looks awesome wielding it, so he’ll carry that too, eventually, but also, I want some high style Genoese fencing for Yusuf to drool over.
> 
> [6] The Crossbow is another weapon particularly famous in relation to Genoa in the Medieval Period. There’s nothing particularly special about the crossbow manufacture or the training given to crossbowmen, but the crossbow was a staple of Genoese warfare in a way it simply _wasn’t_ elsewhere. Every single trade ship leaving Genoa or flying Genoese colors was required to contract with Genoese crossbowmen for official protection. It was really more of a racket than an elite military unit, but it’s something so critical to the Genoese identity (and to Nicolo’s formation in becoming a sniper) that the crossbow could not be left out.
> 
> [7] Again, the Milites Christi, or ‘soldiers of Christ’ are not a real Organization, but an ideal of priestliness. It’s a little like being a ‘gentleman’, not exactly a defined class of people, but still a fairly rigid code of conduct in how one behaves as a priest that truly deserves to serve the Almighty God of Medieval Christians.
> 
> [8] ‘Crusade’ is not a term that was used to reference the First Crusade in any way until well after a hundred years had passed since it commenced. The war was known contemporaneously as a Pilgrimage, and the Crusaders were most-often referred to as Pope Urban’s Pilgrims. I’m using the term Crusade here mainly to highly Nicky’s early hyper-convictions. As there were several other terms for ‘by the cross’ or ‘for the cross’ that did develop contemporaneously to mark specific efforts against pagans and such, often cleared by Church dictum to be counted as active penance, the term is not entirely foreign and a zealot like Nicky could’ve possibly used one.
> 
> [9] The Classical Crusader surcoat would not have been something any of the First Crusade’s soldiers wore. It only came into play in the 12th Century CE as the Knights Templar took semi-formal control of the Crusading efforts and became the formal envoys of all of Christendom in the Holy Lands. However, they almost indisputably stole the image from the Genovesi flag. The Genovese showed up at a lot of pretty important battles in a manner that both seemed very Deus ex Machina and legitimately turned the tides of several struggles, so they honestly became a bizarre symbol of Faith and Holy Purpose nearly half a century before their flag was coopted. While it’s unreasonable to think that many of the other Pilgrims of this first Holy Trek, the Genovesi plausibly DID wear something reminiscent of what modern people picture as ‘Crusader’ garb.
> 
> [10] I’m having Nicky at Antioch only _after_ a pilgrimage to Rome for plot convenience reasons, because I think Nicky would want to be blessed directly by the Pope prior to embarking on a Holy War. Genoese ships did arrive at Antioch in November of 1097, so I’m using those to date reference... My brain just wants them leaving from Rome.
> 
> [11] I’m saying Joe is from Tunis, Tunisia because as we collectively know his movie actor, Marwen Kenzari, is Tunisian. It’s also a place far enough away from Antioch to make a sea-voyage between those two points a very uncomfortable thing for a man who gets at all seasick. Tunis, as Tunis, DID exist during the reign of the Fatimid Caliphate, and the area had been a significant ‘way station’ of trade under the Roman Empire, so it’s perfectly reasonable to think that a prominent merchant family from within the Caliphate would have been based there. The Ancient Carthage connection will also impact Yusuf’s eventual conversations with Andy.
> 
> [12] The Arabic name for Jerusalem is Al-Quds, but they would have known that most of the other cultures with claims on the city called it Jerusalem, especially as both Al-Quds for ‘Holy Place’ and Shalem (from which Salam or ‘peace’ is derived) are words with etymologies traced directly back to Hebrew words for the region, so Jerusalem would’ve been a word with clear meaning to Yusuf in 1099 CE, and for clarity’s sake, I’ll keep the city’s name consistently ‘Jerusalem’ even when flipping between PoVs.
> 
> [13] I can’t remember the exact numbers, nor locate the papers I have with the more formal historical research involved, so this number is pulled from Wikipedia, but it //sounds// right from what I remember.
> 
> [14]Found in the mid-to-late-900’s CE, it was basically the Yale or Princeton of the Fatimid Caliphate, perfect for the second son of a noble merchant family to spend years and years in academia.
> 
> [15] If the 11th Century had prizes for understatement, Yusuf would win them all for that blithe summation. A ‘constant slaughter on both sides’ barely covers the horrors of depravity at Antioch.
> 
> [16] Seriously. Antioch did not go well. It’s claimed as a definitive Crusader victory, because they killed all of the defenders and utterly destroyed the relief force, but they still lost like 30~40,000 people and nearly every single horse they’d brought (and most of the ones they stole after arriving, too). The Crusaders, alone, lost more lives at Antioch than even participated (on both sides) in the Siege of Jerusalem the following year. And that’s without counting any of the civilian casualties, of which there were /thousands/.
> 
> [17] Antioch was located within the Seljuk Empire, as an imperial state under Emir Yaghi-Siyan. It was contested space prior to the Crusader arrival, as the various Caliphates who opposed Turkish rule wanted all the same cities for themselves. However, when Antioch fell to the Seljuks in 1085 CE, pushing the Byzantines out of Syria altogether, it was considered a great collective win for Muslim peoples. The Fatimid Caliphate had only just won Jerusalem back from the Seljuks in 1098 CE, but when the Crusaders arrived, the Muslim peoples all fought against them while semi-united in their goals, with the Fatimid Caliphate focused on Jerusalem, but sending support to the Turks, and getting support in turn (if a bit grudgingly). That ridiculously over-simplifies the situation, but I wanted to make it fairly clear that it IS plausible for a Fatimid fighter to have been at Seljuk-owned Antioch. I think giving Nicky & Joe a full year of dreaming about each other makes the transitions I throw them through feel more viable.
> 
> [18] The first Crusaders arrived at Antioch in late October, 1097 CE. The city was captured in the first days of June, 1098 CE (except for the Citadel at the city’s heart). The Emir Yaghi-Siyan was captured and beheaded, but his son managed to repel the Crusaders from the Citadel long enough for a relief army to arrive.
> 
> [19] The crack in the Siege at Antioch was a classic example of standard spycraft: Invader makes defender friend, promises to save defender’s family if defender leaves gate open for invaders, defender does so, invader proceeds to slaughter //everyone// including the supposed ‘friend’…

\- - - - -

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, yeah... not a lot of interaction yet, but SOON! <3 <3 <3
> 
> Also, with the Biden Inauguration tomorrow, I sincerely hope you all stay safe and be smart about this. To all my local peeps in DC and the whole DMV: just stay home, stay calm, and we'll get through this together! <3 <3 <3


	2. the Siege at Antioch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nicky and Joe wake up from Death and realize that the Afterlife doesn't quite stick for them, or for each other. They each draw their own (rather terrible) conclusions for what that means...
> 
> WARNINGS: this chapter does go into a little more about the atrocities of war. There's nothing depicted at all graphically, but people are really kind of awful during wartime, especially when they believe that God is on their side and they are absolved of all wrong-doings ever for their service in the present war.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I still have a good buffer and I'm hoping to keep up with this posting schedule right on through until the story's finished! As always, you guys have blown me away with how awesomely supportive your response has been! THANK YOU! <3
> 
> I will definitely be getting around to responding to all your lovely comments shortly, I promise, but last night was a much later night than I planned for (oh the wonders of working in a COVID-crazy world) and I have a new semester of classes starting today, so I'm a little more swamped than I thought I'd be... But I LOVE having your feedback and I really do want to respond to all of it individually! <3 <3 <3
> 
> But for now, the First Dogs have settled in at the White House, I can afford to pay my next rent-check, class is super interesting, and all is slightly less wrong with the world than two weeks previously, so enjoy a bit of Immortal Husbands angst!
> 
> (This chapter is a little more historical scene-setting / base-character establishment than I intended it to be, and Nicky and Joe are still pretty non-interactive... Sorry. I promise that they get MUCH more involved with each other next time!)

** Chapter 2: the Siege of Antioch **

Yusuf wakes abruptly, swimming dizzily in the darkness of the makeshift infirmary within Antioch’s famed Citadel[1]. He wakes gasping for breath and clutching at his throat with the desperation of the memory of a fatal wounding singing in his skull.

Except.

His throat is fine.

And as he gains his bearings, he startles into realizing that it was not _his_ throat that had been punctured before he had fallen at the Citadel’s gates.

It was his gut that had suffered the wounding.

Yusuf’s eyes and hand flutter over himself where he remembered being torn apart by the bolt from the invader’s crossbow. All he finds is torn fabric, crusty with the dried remains of a thorough sopping from Yusuf’s own lifeblood.

His skin is smooth, unblemished by so much as a bit of bruising.

But… he _felt_ the last breath of life leave him.

He _felt_ the warm embrace of Allah’s grace…

He remembers the nothingness of a darkness beyond reckoning, remembers the certainty of finding quiet peace in Death.

But he also remembers _dreaming_ … flashes of another battle, with strange weapons, wielded by peoples wearing foreign clothes and speaking foreign tongues.

The only part that’s clear is the bit with bright green eyes trained on him with a fierce, unwavering focus— the eyes of the invader that he killed.

Yusuf does not feel remorse for killing that man, he does _not_.

If anything, he feels triumphant and vindicated.

Allah has spared him from that invader’s killing blow— Allah has rewarded his service with restoring his life, and by doing so condemned the invaders more fully in Yusuf’s mind. If he hadn’t already been convinced that repelling the invaders was the Divine’s great will, he would believe it now, with every fiber of his being.

Yusuf leaves the infirmary, trying not to draw attention to himself.

His people could use a miracle to inspire them, but some hushed warning in the back of his mind— Allah’s direct whisperings of fate, perhaps— urges him to be cautious; to keep silent on his apparent resurrection. Just living through the siege is miracle enough itself.

Yusuf does what he can to help the people huddled in the Citadel’s dark corridors. So few civilians made it, so few soldiers even. Beyond the Citadel’s walls is pure slaughter.

There is no other word for the atrocities these barbaric Christians commit in cutting down Antioch’s population— women, children, even families who worshiped their own Christian god within the enlightened and accepting tolerance safely tucked behind Antioch’s walls. Even dogs and cats and goats are brutally killed and then left to rot in the streets.

The screams persist for days as the Christians rape and kill off all of Antioch’s survivors, and as they burn the libraries and destroy the mosques. As they pillage and burn the houses.

Yusuf hardly sleeps the first few days, far more horrified at the carnage than he is exhausted by surviving it.

Flits of images hide behind his eyelids.

There’s still that foreign land and the distant battles being fought there. As he dreams, the visions get more precise and clear— it becomes apparent that two women always appear at the center of the action, along with a distinct sense of searching curiosity.

But aside from whatever strange message Allah is trying to convey through those dreams, Yusuf also dreams, quite often, of the invader that he killed.

Yusuf dreams of the villain doing the same sort of things as Yusuf himself is doing, as if the man were still alive and huddled near a Frankish campfire as he tries to pretend away the horrors all around him.

The invader hones the edges of his straight blade and dagger while Yusuf puts his scimitar[2] to the whetstone. He gnaws on stale bread dipped in fetid soup while Yusuf sips a broth of boiled down goat hooves and leather with the last dregs of preserved dates. He nurses his brethren through the shudders of infection as their wounds turn toxic or the rampant disease sweeping through their unwashed ranks claim them, while Yusuf wets the fevered brows of his own fellows trapped in the unhealthy damp of the Citadel’s dark corners.

He sneaks food and water to the children in the camp, to the squires brought along by the invaders themselves and to the few strays from Antioch that managed to survive long enough to hide in the nearby caves and who dare a few trips of desperate scavenging. He smiles serenely through what must be the encroaching belly-ache of near starvation as Yusuf himself does the same in passing his own rations to the women and children huddled in his own hell.

It’s frightening how clear such images of the invader are.

It’s disturbing how much kindness and empathy Yusuf imagines in the man behind the vicious monster he’d seen streak across the field of battle.

The fiend pretends compassion so convincingly, like he truly believes his cause is just despite the rape and senseless slaughter his brethren have wrought on sacred ground.

Yusuf doesn’t know how he could possibly have survived the wounding Yusuf gave him—and at first, Yusuf dismisses the dreams as his own too-soft heart trying to convince him to feel guilt for slaying someone whose remarkable eyes had held so much vibrant _life_ behind them.

But Yusuf spots him from the Citadel’s balustrade only a few days[3] after having killed him. The silhouette of him is unmistakable, even in the chaos of a skirmish at the wall.

And if Yusuf had felt any doubts remaining, they would have been entirely discharged once the invader looks up, as if to seek Yusuf out, and their gazes meet.

Those hate-filled green glass eyes bore into Yusuf’s very soul.

Yusuf does not know why this demon still lives.

He does not know why Allah had resurrected Yusuf himself, let alone granted that same miracle to such a vicious and uncultured heathen.

Yusuf stares at the man across the distance, lost in the moment even as the horns sound to herald the arrival of an army from the east to help aid the Muslim defense of the burning city.

The man stares back, sword lowered and entirely exposed as the attention of his fellow soldiers shifts towards defending the remains of the walls they’d only just destroyed.

Yusuf feels an odd clenching in his gut at the man’s lack of spatial awareness in the shifting tide of battle. He could die if he doesn’t pay attention.

It’s an odd sensation of anxiety to feel for an invader, to be uneasy at the notion such a villain might die by his own disinterest in surviving.

But Yusuf quickly finds a rationale.

It must be Allah’s will that _Yusuf_ kills the demonic invader. _That_ must be why Allah granted Yusuf the grace of his miraculous revival. For the invader to be killed by another… it does not sit right with Yusuf, even while fairly sure that the invader will not remain dead long.

His death is _Yusuf’s_ blood to claim.

Eventually, the invader breaks their stare— turning in a ferocious whirl at the last possible second to artfully deflect a blade being aimed at his neck by an insurgent[4] who’d slipped out of the Citadel to do damage to the invader’s backs while their attention was turning towards the fresh might of Kerbogha.

The Muslim defender is dispatched with a startling brutality, his scimitar deflected with an deviously elegant twist of the invader’s long blade and then a knife shoved through his throat at an angle that takes the blade up through the back of his jaw and into his brain[5]. He is fully dead before the invader even pulls the knife from his flesh.

Yusuf watches the stiff cant of the man’s shoulders as he eases the body down. The invader pauses then, facing away from Yusuf. They stand frozen like that for another distended moment of indeterminable duration.

Then, as Yusuf looks on with his pulse thundering oddly in his ears, the invader steps away to join the fight at the gates. He, very pointedly— like he’s trying to resist an urge that grinds against whatever blackness has replaced his soul— does not turn back around.

\- - - - -

\- - - - -

The first time Nicolò wakes from the soft sleep of Death, it takes him twelve hours to revive. He careens back into the world of the living with a frightful gasp and the white-hot sensation of heat and pressure on his throat as his flesh knits back together beneath his fingers.

He’d been _dead_.

Nicolò was more certain of that than of anything he’d ever known.

He’d felt the warmth of Eden’s sun, had smelled the humid air thick with refreshing moisture and the scent of exotic flowers, and he’d heard the angelic harmonies of the Beyond.

Heaven had been at his fingertips.

And then he was back inside his body, drenched in blood and choking on his own ruined lungs as they patched themselves together.

A single moment after the breath of life inside his spirit revived his fragile corpse, and already there is no hint of a wound beneath Nicolò’s frantic fingertips.

His surcoat is caked in rusty brown from being drenched in his life blood, but the skin of his neck is entirely unblemished.

It can only be a miracle.

Nicolò throws himself to his knees, facing east as recites the Lord’s Prayer[6], quoting James[7], and John[8], Jeremiah[9] to find a bit of comfort in the overwhelming awe of having been so clearly _chosen_ by the Almighty to execute His will on earth.

This miracle proves to him that his place in these Crusades[10] is righteous.

But a whisper of caution from the angels tells him to keep quiet about his resurrection.

It is a miracle and his people could surely use the light of such good news, but such divine intervention could prove unduly distracting.

It is not that he doubts his fellow soldiers could see the Divine’s hand in this, but he is aware that God’s choice to save _him_ could be taken poorly by the exhausted men who’ve already lost so many of their bothers. They would not mean to accuse him of devilry, and they would likely come to regret it when he eventually fulfilled God’s glorious purpose, but it would be cruel to ask them to keep such Faith while grief so entirely defines them.

So, as Nicolò finishes his prayers, he resolves to stay silent on his resurrection.

The entire company of men he’d been fighting with had been killed around him, so no one had been left to witness his own demise. It meant that his appearance at a campfire in the early morning hours was met with relief rather than suspicion.

Nicolò is welcomed back to his brothers in arms and manages to sleep fitfully.

He dreams of the man who killed him, the hateful Saracen whose arrow had pierced his throat. Nicolò’s main comfort is that he had killed the heathen in turn.

But in his dreams, that man is not dead.

He’s living on like Nicolò, taking comfort in helping his fellows where he can.

The images of the Saracen get more disturbing as the next few days drag on.

The Crusaders raze the city in such a way as Nicolò has never seen. They paint the streets in blood of every living thing they come across within the city’s walls; women and children, goats and house pets, nothing and no one is spared or given mercy. Rape is common, as is blatant theft and the superfluous destruction of libraries.

Nicolò understands destroying the religious sites of these heathens, but _libraries_ seem a thing too far in the senselessness of such destruction.

But it’s the rape and slaughter that makes Nicolò feel the most off kilter.

Some of these people are Christians, having lived peacefully among the Saracen horde for decades now. They’d come to worship the One True God, and while they’d had to pay homage to the political rulers of the region, they’d never strayed from the propriety of religion.

And the Crusaders, coming here to _save_ these faithful citizens, had raped and killed and ruined them… Which makes Nicolò feel distinctly sick and wronged in such a way as if he himself had been gutted by his fellow Christians.

For days, Nicolò does what he can to help heal his wounded fellows, and to help bury the bodies of the fallen, and to help salvage the lives of the few children who’d escaped the siege’s slaughter to hide in the hills.

And each night he dreams of the man who killed him.

Dark eyes, warm with a passionate depth beyond words.

Soft hands, ginger and gentle as they tend a wound.

Deep voice, singing resonant praise to his heathen god and words of comfort in the dark.

There are women in Nicolò’s dreams as well, just flashes of strange dress and stranger tongues and faces that look unutterably foreign.

But they are not as clear as the man who’d killed him, and they aren’t nearly half as captivating to reflect upon in the quite moments of his slow and harrowing days.

Eventually, Nicolò becomes convinced that the man who killed him truly lives as well— despite his equal certainty that Nicolò’s crossbow bolt _had_ killed him.

Eventually, Nicolò decides that the man is a demon, meant to test him. Nicolò comes to understand that he was resurrected so that he could kill this heathen, that he’s been granted a Godly immortality to even the odds against the Saracen’s black magic.

_Eventually_ , Nicolò sees the man again— standing on the wall of the Citadel where the last of Antioch’s defenders have been making their final stand.

The moment they make eye contact, Nicolò feels the world shift beneath his feet.

He _feels_ God’s Will being pressed into a moment.

This man is his Destiny.

Nicolò will rise to meet the Fate that God has planned for him.

But first, Nicolò will help his fellow Christians as the bible teaches that he should.

He’s found a child of one of the Christian families that had lived in Antioch, a child who speaks Latin well enough for them to communicate with relative ease. Trust is harder to create between them, but the child’s desperation goes a long way towards thwarting his fears.

His Family is yet alive, trapped with many other civilians inside the Citadel. They want nothing more than to escape and to live their lives as best they can. But the Crusaders will slaughter anyone they see who isn’t clearly one of their own comrades.

Nicolò is their only chance of getting out of this with their lives and any dignity in tact.

He takes this role extremely seriously, feeling that it’s part of the Plan which God has laid out for his glorious destiny. _This_ must be what God has planned for him, not just the senseless slaughter that his comrades are inflicting. The abject _horror_ in what he sees simply cannot be an act of the Holy Spirit on high.

The Almighty resurrected him, perhaps, like Jesus, His Son, was reborn, to provide salvation to those with nowhere else to turn.

Nicolò will save as many of the Innocents as he possibly can, even if he has to die a thousand and one more deaths to do it.

For several days, Nicolò scouts for ways out of the city— finds secluded routes to traverse between the best ways out and the hidden access points to the Citadel itself.

Then he escorts a group of 20, Christians and Muslims and even several Jewish Families[11], through the still-burning rubble as most of the Crusader army is distracted by an attacking army from the North East meant to bring the heathens trapped inside the Citadel some hope of salvation.

He gets the refugees to within sight of the outer wall, almost within reach of the road that will take them to the sanctuary of Aleppo, before his course is challenged.

It’s _his_ Saracen, of course, the one who killed him.

“ _Currite **[12]**!_” Nicolò shouts over the howl of the Saracen as he draws his blade to meet the attack. He knows he will not survive this fight, but he will die protecting them. “ _Abite **[13]**!_”

The civilians shout something unintelligible as Nicolò and the Saracen cross blades, but they heed his warnings to escape. The fight between them is predictably brief, though it is still much more drawn out that most of Nicolò’s engagements as this Saracen is quite skilled.

Nicolò gets hit in the shoulder— deep enough for the cut to nick the blood vessel in his neck that holds the rush of life within him.

He takes solace as he falls to his knees in the bloody dirt in the fact that he managed to stab the Saracen through the gut with his dagger. Even if he chases the civilian Christians, the heathen won’t be able to live long enough to kill them.

The demon Saracen may yet rise again, or this might be what finally pierces through his immortal-making magic, but either way, as Nicolò falls, he falls feeling that his purpose has been fulfilled as best he could have managed it.

It’s enough a comfort for him to make slipping into Death’s embrace feel peaceful.

\- - - - -

**Historical Notes:**

> [1] Antioch was built with a remarkably well-fortified Citadel at its heart, locally known as Antakya Kalesi. It was originally constructed around the 4th century BC as a Macedonian city and it’s massive, which makes the housing of civilians during the Siege of Antioch a plausible turn (as well as the potential escapes of said civilians). Capturing the Citadel took a further 3 weeks after the official capture of Antioch by the Crusaders in 1097 CE (admittedly some of that time lag was definitely due to the Crusaders themselves being besieged by a relief army of Seljuk forces 40k strong lead by Kerbogha).
> 
> [2] In the movie and the comic, Yusuf wields a scimitar with a highly recognizable fat curve. The saber he’d be more likely to have used is a Saif, and has a much narrower blade, but I like the aesthetics of the later scimitars better. Scimitars developed as we know them a bit later (give or take three hundred years), and most of the Arabic swords in the Crusades were likely thinner, slightly straighter blades, like Shamshirs. The thin sabers were introduced to the western Arab states in the 800’s CE, but it’s not impossible to think that wealthy merchants found a few broader ‘show’ swords, too, particularly merchants traveling further east into Asia where the shape of Dao swords, and Mongolian sabers (and others of the like), were already developing wider curves and flared tips. (Fun fact, ‘scimitar’ is actually just the Italian-coined term for curved Arabic Saif blades.)
> 
> [3] Kerbogha’s relief army arrives about 6 days after the main city of Antioch falls, trapping the Crusaders inside the city that they’ve just destroyed and keeping them stuck there for about 3 weeks as they fought on 2 fronts.
> 
> [4] "Insurgent" is a term developed in the 17th Century for revolutionaries, rebels, or (as in this case) resistance fighters, it was not part of the lexicon in the 10th Century, and it certainly did not mean the sort of urban warfare guerilla tactics of modern day fanatics in places like Afghanistan or Iraq (or the fricken US Capitol...), but those tactics were definitely in place and actively utilized at Antioch’s ‘Second Siege’. I’ve used the term here to draw a specific image up in the minds of modern readers, but no contemporary sources would’ve used it.
> 
> [5] A knife through the jaw straight into the brain is one of the fastest ways to die ever devised, faster even than a bullet on the same path. Even at the height of his hate, even in the chaos of battle, Nicky’s doling out mercy-killings. Yusuf will reflect on this later. Right now, all he can see is the decisiveness of the blow and he labels it ‘brutality’ out of his own hatred.
> 
> [6] One of the most prominent prayers in Christendom, comes from Matthew 6: 9-13. (It's the one that starts "Our Father, who art in Heaven, Hallowed be Thy Name..." etc.
> 
> [7] James 1: 5, and James 4: 3, are about accepting God’s Will in place of your own wants / needs / desires.
> 
> [8] John 5: 14 is about questioning God’s Will because doing so is human, and how God hears but answers in his own way. It looks at how doubt is natural, but so is confidence in the Rightness of the ineffable Plan.
> 
> [9] Jeremiah 42: 3 is probably the most direct of the verses I’m thinking of on this topic. It basically says that God has a plan for people, and He will tell a believer how to walk the most Path-i-est of Paths and DO / _all_ / the Things. (You can tell, I was never sent to the corner in Sunday School, right? _/Totally/_ reverent and respectful... But seriously, that paraphrasing is the most accurate thought-for-thought translation of that passage that I've managed to uncover in many years of post-Sunday school theological studies). 
> 
> [10] Again, Nicky is jumping the gun when he calls the war he’s involved with the ‘Crusades’, as the term did not fully develop as we understand it today until the 1700’s. This war would’ve simply been called a Pilgrimage (literally just a ‘religious journey’ from the word ‘ _iter’_ , and its warriors would have call themselves Pilgrims, or Holy Itinerants. The term ‘crucesignatus’ was in active play for the Crusaders themselves only at the turn of the 13th Century CE. However, several other terms for ‘by the cross’ or ‘for the cross’ did develop to mark specific efforts against pagans and such, particularly within Italy, and they were often cleared by Church dictum to be counted as active penance, so the term is not entirely foreign. I’m having Nicky use it for two reasons: first, for narrative clarity, and second, for emphasis on how fully he believes in this war that he will come to see as cruel and ridiculous.
> 
> [11] Prominent Christians were kicked out of Antioch before the siege began, but the city’s long history of acceptance and tolerance meant that a lot of civilian families of various religions remained inside the walls to be slaughtered in the siege.
> 
> [12] Latin, Imperative Plural of ‘currō, currere – to run’
> 
> [13] Latin, Imperative Plural of ‘abeo, abire – to go away’

\- - - - -

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, thank you guys for being SOOOOOOO awesome! I will totally be addressing all your wonderful, life-giving comments shortly, but possibly not until tomorrow!
> 
> NEXT TIME: Just a teeny-tiny bit more scene-setting and then TEAMWORK with Nicky and Joe finding a sliver of common ground to work with in the face of saving innocent lives...


	3. In the Ashes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Within the walls of Antioch, as the siege of the Citadel drags on, Nicky & Joe scrape out a narrow piece of common ground (VERY narrow, and territory that comes extremely hard-won).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You guys have been absolutely AMAZING!!!!
> 
> And to celebrate, both your awesomeness and the more or less official-ish, newly-not-awful beginning of 2021 (though I'm still holding out for my real count of the new year to begin on the Lunar New Year, Friday Feb 12th), here's some almost-progress with the eventually inseparable Immortal Husbands!
> 
> Yes! We get actual teamwork(-ish) and the start of 'maybe we should work together' questioning! It's not much, but if any of y'all know me from my other stories, I am in this for the long haul! My specialty is that hella slow burn and the wild, pining ride it creates for sweet idiots like these guys! ^_~
> 
> On to the ANGST!!

** Chapter 3: In the Ashes **

**|| JOE ||**

The second time Yusuf dies, it takes him hours to bleed out.

He’d been stabbed in the gut by an invader, by _his_ invader; the undying one for whose ultimate demise he is surely destined to bring about, the one whose unholy skill in battle must be the reason Yusuf has been granted this immortality by Allah...

Yusuf bleeds out a little more with every step. But he manages to hide the evidence and ignore the wound long enough to save the group of civilians who’d been trying to escape Antioch before the invader found them. A few of them try to tell Yusuf a strange story about the invader having _helped_ them, of the invader being the only reason they’d made it this far, but Yusuf chalks it up to his own excessive blood loss causing an undue confusion that muddles his brain.

Besides, if the invader _was_ helping them, it probably would’ve simply been that he was helping them right into a trap of his waiting barbaric brethren.

As soon as the civilians are safely on their way to Aleppo, Yusuf makes his way back to relative security within the walls of the Citadel, claims a relatively ‘private’ corner that isn’t overly damp, and promptly dies as the last of his lifeblood drains away.

A scant three or four hours after he draws his final breath, life shudders back into Yusuf’s lungs all over again as his abdomen’s flesh melds itself back together beneath his shaking fingers. It’s less than a third of the time his first resurrection took.

The wound he suffered was less substantial, he supposes.

He can’t imagine that it could ever be like his body is learning and improving on a _skill_ in riving itself from the cold rigidity of death… that would be absurd.

But it is hard to ignore this second miracle, this bounty from Allah that so clearly indicates how his purpose on this earth is not yet fulfilled.

And his dreams are still filled with the invader’s face— stoic with a strangely serene sort of absolute focus, even as he died.

It likely means that Yusuf’s Adversary[1] lives as well.

If Allah means for them to die a thousand and one times together before their final End can take them, then that is what Yusuf will ensure comes to pass.

Over the next few weeks, Yusuf does all he can to shelter the civilians and smuggle as many of them out of the city as he can. He leaves the rickety, futile defense of Antioch and the Citadel to his fellow soldiers, knowing that all is already long past lost, and he can serve Allah best right now by saving those innocents who are his children.

He meets the invader in battle several more times.

Each time, their fight lasts a little longer while more and more of their martial skill is brought to bear as they learn the quirks and habits of their opponents.

The invader’s swordplay is unnervingly impressive, and Yusuf bears his skill a grudging respect. Yusuf has rarely dueled anyone so skilled, certainly never met a foreigner with such deadly flair and elegantly lethal style.

Yusuf comes to admire the whirling dance of blade the invader makes, a rather more thorough admiration than he feels entirely comfortable with admitting.

The shape of his dreams shifts slightly, too.

Yusuf can’t put his finger on what about them changes, exactly, but if pressed, he’d say that something in the _colors_ of it warms a bit— adds a bit of sweetness and an odd nostalgia.

The change is too strange an evolution to tell whether it’s a positive development.

Eighteen days after finding the invader and saving that first group of civilian refugees, Yusuf meets the invader again under far more unexpected circumstances: a truce.

Between their first meeting inside Antioch and this moment, they’ve killed each other at least a dozen times— always both together, each dying every time by the other’s eager and frightfully steady hands.

The _end_ of this moment will be no different, Yusuf knows, but for the moment’s stretched duration there’s a stand-off between them… because the invader has a hostage.

It’s a child, no older than eleven.

The invader’s knife is at his throat, with his hand on the child’s shoulder to hold him steady. The blade is flat against the child’s neck, with neither edge actively at risk of cutting into his skin, but Yusuf has been stabbed with that very blade often enough to know how it easily flits between the invader’s fingers. A single twitch could be enough to kill the boy.

When the invader calls out _‘Saracen’_ to get his attention, Yusuf responds by drawing his weapon— only slightly confused as to why he’d been given the courtesy of an announcement from a relatively safe distance instead of simply being gutted yet again.

When Yusuf sees the invader step into the square, when he spots the child that the vile barbarian is holding hostage, Yusuf freezes. He does not quite throw down his weapon or throw up his meager lunch, but he’s wavering on a hair’s trigger toward falling either way.

The child, strangely, does not look very much afraid. He’s hardly even reasonably alarmed. The thrum of his pulse, visible beneath the barbarian’s blade, is quick but steady— as is the bizarrely easy rise and fall of his chest as he breathes.

The invader grumbles something in that strange, sing-song language of his.

Or no… this isn’t what he’s used before.

_This_ is what… what the army as a whole uses to speak to each other despite coming from varied nations with backgrounds of varied language.

Their own version of Sabir[2].

The child seems to understand it, as he’s looking up at the invader carefully as he processes the words and then nods when the invader’s tone lilts up in question.

Then he turns to face Yusuf and says in perfect local Arabic[3], “He just wants to talk for a moment, he has a proposal for you.”

“Then let him talk,” Yusuf growls fiercely, directing all the fire in his soul through the embers of his eyes as he glares at the invader.

The boy nods and the invader begins a shpeal in clipped, hurried language.

His hostage translates in an abbreviated paraphrase, saying, “You two have been fighting each other while accomplishing the same goal: saving civilians. He says there’s a group of almost 50 ready to leave and dozen more than could be ready in an hour. There’s an imminent attack from the invaders being planned and they _will_ take the citadel tonight. This is the last chance to escape for anyone inside. He says he cannot protect so many people on his own.”

“He wants my _help_ ,” Yusuf states plainly, utterly incredulous.

“Yes,” the boy replies.

“He wants me to help him lead these civilians into a trap for his brethren?”

“No!” the boy protests, with startling conviction. “He’s been helping us, bringing us food and teaching us how to avoid the Frankish soldiers.”

Yusuf cants an eyebrow up at the knife to the boy’s neck.

The invader sees him do it, and whether he can understand the words or not, it’s clear he knows the meaning of Yusuf’s accusation.

He removes the knife from the boy’s neck and steps fully away, hands raised in a placating pantomime of surrender that’s meaningless so long as he holds onto that knife.

Conflict crosses the invader’s expression as he seems to realize it.

In a sort of compromise, the invader sheaths the knife at his belt and keeps his hand up.

Then moving slowly, he taps his chest twice and says, “Nicolò. Nicolò di Genova.”

“ _Neek-uh-low_ ,” Yusuf repeats on autopilot, tasting the music in the word. The invader nods and taps his chest twice again, a flicker of a half-smile twisting his features.

The name sparks something else in Yusuf, a simmering fury from the time before the war, but he cannot afford to let his attention slip while the invader is standing here before him[4].

Then, derailing all musings of the past, the invader gestures slowly to Yusuf— entreating a measure of reciprocation.

Grudgingly, Yusuf says his own name, or part of it at least, “Yusuf, Yusuf al-Kaysani.”

He does not trust the invader with his father’s name, or his father’s father’s name. But if this accord is to be a true one, and _by Allah_ Yusuf hopes beyond sense that it may be, he needs to offer up a little something of himself in genuine trade.

The invader’s smile grows, only slightly— but in a way that feels unerringly steady, blisteringly calm and sure, just like his hand on a blade as it ever slides through Yusuf’s ribs.

To allay any lingering fears Yusuf may have, the invader gives a deep bow that exposes his neck and back completely. It makes Yusuf believe, somehow, that Allah has convinced this demon, however temporarily, to put a stop to as much of the wider carnage as possible.

Yusuf nods when the invader straightens and allows the man to lead him to the group of refugees he’s claimed are readying to flee.

There’s 67 of them, by Yusuf’s count— possibly more.

It takes 6 hours of running back and forth, escorting smaller, faster, more maneuverable groups, to get them all outside the ruined walls of Antioch. Working together means they can move at speed, trading off with checking corners and watching the rear in leap-frog motions as they guide the small groups forward. They get all 67 people out.

They get another three dozen out afterwards.

They’ve saved nearly a hundred people by the time the Citadel begins to burn and they are forced to consider the city entirely lost.

The invader stares mournfully at the flames, like he truly regrets the part he played in bringing such heinous devastation into being.

It makes Yusuf furious to see, too furious to keep the feeling bottled up.

He shouts vitriol at the invader, speaking his native Tunisian Amazigh rather than bothering with Arabic as their little translator is no longer available to clarify things for communication between them.

The anger in the words is clear enough, Yusuf thinks, and the pain.

The invader looks at him, clearly alarmed, face growing truly wary as Yusuf gesticulates at the smoke of the fires that the invader’s own people set to burning.

The invader is the first to draw his sword, but Yusuf is the first to _use_ his blade. He regrets it almost immediately as he impales himself on the invader’s sword in the process slitting the man’s vulnerable throat.

Yusuf dies as he falls on top of the invader, that strangely beautiful sword still in his gut.

He wakes a few hours later to find the invader sitting beside him, cleaning his blade with sad eyes and a closed-off expression.

It seems like the barbarian has healed first this time.

Why he stuck around to see if Yusuf healed is something Yusuf doesn’t know; something he doesn’t particularly care to find out, honestly.

But as soon as it’s clear that Yusuf _has_ revived, the invader stands up with a heavy, labored huff— watching as Yusuf flails while his body knits itself back together.

“ _Yusuf_ ,” he says eventually, as Yusuf’s suffering quiets enough to let him try to catch his breath. “ _Videbo vos. Ad Jerusalem **[5]**_.”

The meaning is clear enough.

Yusuf just throws one last glare at the invader’s back and then rests his head as he lets the demon walk away.

He, like the invader, knows for certain that the shared path within their story isn’t over.

\- - - - -

\- - - - -

**|| NICKY ||**

When Nicolò dies at the emotional outburst of the Saracen[6], he almost doesn’t blame the man. Clearly, he’d been biding his time just enough to help the civilians, planning from the outset to kill him. Nicolò had thought, for a moment, that perhaps they could move past this constant killing and re-killing over each other, but as Antioch burned, so did the Saracen’s fury.

Nicolò had died feeling sure that his purpose in God’s Plan was to save people from the horrors of what carnage he and his countrymen had helped to reap.

He wakes feeling just as certain.

For truly, over the last three weeks of slaughter, Nicolò had come to be convinced that God’s plan could not possibly be realized in such indiscriminate killing.

He still hates the Saracens, hates how vicious and bloodthirsty they are, but it is not the civilians’ fault that their soldiers are such scoundrels. The heathens do not know the Grace of God and therefore could not truly make an educated choice between the True God and the heathens’ imposter.

Over the last few weeks, Nicolò has come to realize that perhaps God’s Plan did not involve his killing of the Saracen. If it did, he would have been able to make such come to be.

Instead, God had granted them both a seemingly limitless immortality.

Perhaps God’s Ineffable Plan is grander than that simple thought, perhaps it is intended to have them work together… as distasteful as that thought may be.

In working separately for the same goal, they’d saved a respectable two or three hundred innocents over the last three weeks.

They had saved almost a hundred people in a single day by working together.

It had felt… _right_ working with the Saracen. Nicolò barely trusted the man sufficiently enough to believe he would refrain from stabbing him in the back, but they’d managed the feat together well enough.

And it felt entirely right to be _saving_ people, to have saved _so many_ people.

When Nicolò wakes with the heathen’s dead body on top of him— Nicolò’s sword still skewered through his belly— Nicolò had wondered if their mutual purpose had finally been fulfilled, though he doubted even then that his conclusion could be viable.

If it had been the truth, Nicolò himself probably would not have woken up.

If his fate had been accomplished, Nicolò would not have revived from the chill embrace of death given at his Saracen’s hand yet again.

He would simply have been taken swiftly into Heaven’s final sweet embrace.

Nicolò’s death had been quick this time, almost merciful.

He hadn’t bled out, instead his spine had been severed by the wicked curve of the Saracen’s blade— his quickest death to date, and his quickest revival.

But he has to wonder why the Saracen had not revived this time, as well.

His wound was grievous, though— far more so than Nicolò’s.

And Nicolò’s sword is still stuck fast inside his gut.

Moving gingerly, despite knowing far too well first-hand how the dead could feel no pain, Nicolò removes his sword and lays the Saracen gently on his back.

Instead of moving away immediately, Nicolò sets about cleaning the blood and viscera from his blade— sitting just beyond arm’s reach of the dead Saracen, waiting for proof that he too would be reviving to continue their strange and bloody dance another day.

It takes nearly half an hour.

But then _Life_ splutters back into the Saracen’s being.

Satisfied with his understanding of his persisting place in the world, and feeling malcontent with how the uneasy prickle of high-anxiety in his chest quickly begins to settle at the sight of his opponent’s revival, Nicolò stands.

“Yusuf,” he says, the word is a brush of softness and music unlike any other note Nicolò has ever tasted. With a respectful half-bow, he promises, “Videbo vos. Ad Jerusalem[7].”

He leaves the Saracen behind with that, feeling the man’s dark eyes on his back long after he steps away across the dry plains.

Nicolò joins the Crusader army traveling along the Via Maris[8]. He breaks away from the army occasionally, to run ahead and warn villagers of the army’s malevolent approach, and to help evacuate the countryside before Crusaders could raid the farmland for supplies and sport.

He sticks with the army as they near Jaffa, as they turn east up the Aijalon Valley. He fights at Beirut, and at Tyre, and at Arqa, putting down enough heathen soldiers to keep the full confidence of his fellow Crusaders, and saving enough innocents to feel fulfilled in his purpose.

Nicolò picks up more and more bits of Arabic. Nothing truly helpful, but enough to make his efforts at helping evacuate the civilians a little more effective.

Between the obvious destination of the army giving enough warning to most civilians and Nicolò’s own efforts to warn local people of the army’s imminent arrival, the Crusaders meet almost no resistance between Arqa and Jerusalem.

And they have extremely little sport with any locally settled civilians in the countryside— only a very few prove too stubborn to leave at Nicolò’s urging, and even fewer are likely still residing in areas Nicolò cannot get to before the army invades.

All the while, Nicolò continues to dream of the man[9].

The dreams are very different now, however— now he dreams up scenes of far more domestic moments than could ever have been achieved on a wartime campaign. And he dreams, not of the Saracen alone, but of them both together— walking through a market in the heart of Genova, or sitting peacefully in a piazza in Rome.

In his dreams they speak, as friends, of art and music and poetry.

They speak of God and miracles.

The words the Saracen speak are always fuzzy to Nicolò, but his deep voice is always as resonant and passionate as Nicolò remembers from the battle field and the exact words hardly matter to him as much as the warm tone. And there was _such_ warmth in the tone.

Such warmth as Nicolò could not possibly hope to rationalize.

Nicolò wakes most days feeling like his skin is stretched too tight across his body.

But he carries on the work he is doing without fail. Every vicious solider he kills, he kills in God’s name, and every innocent he saves, he _saves_ in God’s name.

Nicolò throws himself entirely into serving out his divine purpose, full of Faith and the Grace of understanding that came from having been blessed directly by His divine hand.

And then, almost a year to the day since last seeing Yusuf, his immortal Saracen, Nicolò meets him on the field of battle at Jerusalem.

There is chaos and carnage all around them, but as soon as Nicolò finds the Saracen’s silhouette, all he feels the weight of Destiny settle over him in a forceful sort of _calm_.

Nicolò pauses in his slaughter of the soldiers, meets his counterpart’s gaze and nods.

The Saracen glares back at him, no less furious and venom- filled than he’d been a year ago. The strange softness he’d exhibited inside Nicolò’s dreams was just Nicolò’s own imagined flights of fancy— his unconscious mind trying to make desperate sense of what God’s Plan for the pair of them could be.

Clearly, their Fates are intricately and inevitably entwined, _how so_ is the only question.

But Nicolò’s strange dreams of friendship are very obviously one-sided fantasies.

He remembers that the man’s name is YoSif or Yusaef… or _Yusuf_ , that’s it, but Nicolò certain that the man has not done him the same curtesy of remembering _his_ name. For some reason, that notion holds a sting behind the nebulousness of the thought.

Nicolò dismisses it as more proof of how utterly one-sided his hopes had been for something different developing between them after their accord at Antioch.

Nicolò and Yusuf cross swords in battle once again.

They kill each other, again and again and yet again, for at least the 50th time— though Nicolò has truly lost his place in their on-going count.

And, as always, they wake a short while later— this time even quicker than they had during their clashes at Antioch, both are only rendered dead at their first engagement here for a short few minutes before they come shuddering back to life.

They split ways that first evening with very little acknowledgement of their connection.

Yusuf goes inside the walls without looking back and Nicolò rejoins the camp awaiting the arrival of his countrymen from Jaffa— the Genoese are bringing siege machines.

The devastation these instruments could reap is terrifying.

But at least this siege will not be endlessly prolonged.

Jerusalem will not be nearly as drawn out as Antioch.

Nicolò can only hope that such would prove to be a blessing.

\- - - - -

**Historical Notes:**

> [1] Yusuf is literally calling Nicky the Devil when he calls him the Adversary. It’s a commonality between Jewish, Islamic, and Christian thought that Satan (which is a word derived in English from the Hebrew ha-sâtan or just sâtan ( שָּׂטָן ), simply meaning adversary or the accuser / opposer, and the Arabic Shayāṭīn ( شياطين ), meaning any creature distant from the divine. Judaic tradition evolved out of other Israeli religions, all of which had a vague oppositional concept, in ~500 BCE, but the vague adversarial pseudo-entity isn’t given a _name_ sort of name (instead of a category of being the Bad Guy / Evil Influence -TM) until Christian traditions confuse the term meant for generic-ultimate-adversary as being meant for Specific-Bad-Guy-Named-Satan. Islamic traditions maintained a more vague use of the term, considering it more as a counterpart host of demons against agents of the divine, but as Yusuf is a poet, and in close contact with traders in the near east he would know the exact connotations used for the term ‘Adversary’ in western thought, especially in as late as the 11th Century CE.
> 
> [2] Sabir is what’s known as commonality base or pidgin language meant as a ‘lingua franca’ (literally just a common learned-language, like Latin to a native French speaker and a native German one) to be used between varied-background merchants and travelers. It combines the basics for a whole bunch of languages, mixes them up in a lazy-man’s blender, and spits out something that is almost universal in how it’s unintelligible, but a ‘close-enough’ meaning can be guessed at by basically anyone. It’s like talking to a baby. They definitely didn’t actually say a word there, but that not-word probably means x. Sabir draws on primarily eastern Mediterranean languages, drawing on a few romance languages like French and Portuguese, but mostly pulling from Berber, Turkish, Greek, and Arabic.
> 
> [3] True, perfectly historically accurate Yusuf, merchant from Tunisia, probably speaks a Berber dialect. Only about 5 million people currently speak any variety of Berber Tunis, or more properly Tunisian Amazigh (as ‘Berber’ is largely considered a European term that only developed in the 1600’s), and I have not met any of them. Google translate does not have a Berber or Amazigh option. So, I’m gonna use mostly Arabic for Yusuf because by about 700 CE, the Arabs had moved in and Tunis was a fully Arabic Muslim State. Berber-speaking Yusuf would’ve known Arabic in the way that Genoese-Ligurian speaking Nicky would’ve known common Italian (as Ligurian was already beginning to fade out of common use by nobility in the 960’s CE), though Arabic had been in place for a few hundred years longer, so it’s more like someone in modern Quebec learning French & English at the same time.
> 
> [4] Fog of war and present danger is a VERY powerful distraction. He won’t remember Nicky’s name later and he certainly isn’t in a mental place to realize that Nicolò di Genova is from Genoa yet, but he will and it will prove problematic for reasons that will be explained when relevant.
> 
> [5] Latin, Future Imperfect, literally, ‘I will see you. At Jerusalem’. Grammatically correct in Nicky’s reticent style.
> 
> [6] Just a reminder, ‘Saracen’ is a racist, pitiably Euro-centric term that makes no delineation between any brown-skinned peoples at all. It’s also extremely derogatory in origin (as Joe and Nicky will discuss directly, later). I’m only having Nicky use it because it IS historically accurate.
> 
> [7] A note on “Videbo vos. Ad Jerusalem”: this phrase (still meaning, “I will see you. At Jerusalem” in Latin), is italicized when Yusuf hears it, but not when Nicky speaks it. The reason for that is how convention states that foreign language should be italicized: it’s only foreign to Joe. And I dislike the trend of how some authors do not respect their characters’ origins by italicizing all non-English terms because their audience is presumed to be exclusively English speaking. So, henceforth, this will be a continuing trend: if a character truly speaks the non-English language being used, it will not be italicized. If they don’t speak it, if they hear it as foreign or are barely beginning to learn to speak it themselves, it will be italicized.
> 
> [8] An ancient Roman road that tracks from Anatolia to Cairo.
> 
> [9] The dreams Nicky keeps having of Joe after they meet at Antioch are no longer the ‘find-me flashes’ but genuine, subconscious longing, crazy mental coping mechanism /DREAMS/. Same for Joe. I haven’t decided if I want them to be pseudo-magic, and related to the fact that these two are clearly soulmates, or if I want it to just be mutual pining, but I want to be clear that the expected ‘find-me’ dreams do stop for the pair, but their fixation on each other over powers the ‘find-me’ dreams they have of the others.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So they've finally made it to the city where Things really change for them!  
> It's been a hard road and it's unfortunately about to get even harder...
> 
> Next Time: The Immortal Husbands have at with killing each other at Jerusalem, many times... and Joe has his first significant Crises of Faith.
> 
> ALSO: And FYI for you guys, I will not be here to post next week. I have a 'real life' Thing. Unfortunately, it's not a good Thing (like a job interview), but it's also not a bad Thing (like Family COVID consequences), it's just a Class Thing, but it's a Class Thing that cannot be avoided and I cannot rearrange my work schedule to fit a post in here. I can schedule stuff on other platforms, but not on Ao3, so no post. I WILL be back the week afterwards, however!
> 
> If you wanna get the scheduled posts and check out what else I'm up to at the moment, come check out **[ my Tumblr ! ](https://astyle-alex.tumblr.com/) **  
> The post specific to my Current Projects is linked below!  
> [ https://astyle-alex.tumblr.com/post/642008888443650048/well-my-posting-on-tumblr-in-january-was-worth ](https://astyle-alex.tumblr.com/post/642008888443650048/well-my-posting-on-tumblr-in-january-was-worth)


	4. the Siege at Jerusalem

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The 40 days of fighting at Jerusalem and then a dozen days of what comes after... Things get complicated for the men on both sides of the war.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one's got the usual load of violence and gore, but we're finally getting more into the internal headspaces of these idiots, so the angst of it all hits a lot harder here than in previous chapters. ^_~
> 
> (We're finally getting to the good stuff!)

Chapter 4: the Siege of Jerusalem

The Siege of Jerusalem takes only 39 days, but it is a heinous 39 days of constant, bloody, _awful_ fighting— vicious and blood thirsty in a way Nicolò has never seen before.

He and Yusuf find each other on the battlefield every single day. Without fail, Nicolò is killed by his Saracen counterpart and, with equal surety, he kills the man in turn. They’re reviving much quicker now, and doing so consistently, which means that sometimes they kill each other and revive two or five or ten times within a single skirmish— picking up the fight right where they left off in dying.

It becomes something of a dance between them.

The metaphor suits the whirling aggression of the Saracen’s scimitar extremely well. He is quite skilled and moves with an elegance steeped in nearly bottomless endurance. Nicolò considers his own skills as evenly matched without deriving any shame from the observation.

The near admiration Nicolò develops for his enemy only makes his conviction even stronger in believing that God has endowed him with this immortality specifically to kill this demonic Saracen— pushing his previous doubts almost entirely aside. If Nicolò can utilize God’s gift properly, if he can successfully end this demon’s reign in the world of mortal men, perhaps the rest of the Saracen horde will die with him— perhaps they will relinquish the Holy Land without further, senseless bloodshed and perhaps the pirates among their unscrupulous lot will cease their on-going harassment of Genoa and other coastal towns whose populations face marauders with nothing but their lives and livelihoods to give.

If dying at the hands of this heathen ten thousand times over saves even one life among his countrymen, Nicolò believes the sacrifice’s rewards will have been well worth the cost.

The Saracen fights like a raging fury, like a storm on the sea.

He shouts insults at Nicolò near constantly, constructing a fairly vivid scene of obscenities regarding a comparison between Nicolò and a woman who fornicates with a diseased three-legged goat. Nicolò cannot catch all the details of the Saracen’s prolonged insults, both because his Arabic is spotty and his attention is divided, but he gets enough.

Nicolò does not dignify such crass indecorousness with any obvious response.

It _does_ grate on him, however, stoking the hatred he has for the Saracens that had been hot-burning well before this demon had appeared.

Now, his hatred burns like a smithy’s forge, each beat of his heart and each clash of blades injecting the raging fire with fresh oxygen as intense as a bellows.

By the start of their third week doing this, it seems that Nicolò has stopped fighting other Saracens entirely. He’s hardly even conscious that there are other members of the enemy armies on the field. Nicolò and _his_ Saracen are in a struggle set entirely apart from the rest of the conflict— Nicolò will put down an enemy who charges him as he makes his way toward _his_ Saracen, but he no longer seeks any of them out as he treks to the low rise in the pale dirt that has become the regular site of his daily contest with Yusuf al-Kaysani.

By the 25th dawn of the Siege, Nicolò has started actively avoiding clashes with the other Saracens. His fellow pilgrims give him looks filled with varied degrees of toxic suspicion when he heads out even before the call to arms is heralded, but each evening he returns to camp and every time he’s covered in enough fresh blood to satisfy any man who might be inclined to suspect him of desertion.

The looks stop holding barbs by the 30th day.

They start holding something like admiration.

Nicolò isn’t certain if that makes him feel more or less sick to his stomach than when he felt their silent accusations of his cowardice.

The men in the Crusader camps admire him because they think he’s _driven_. Because they believe he’s motivated by God Himself to go out as early as he can to kill the Saracens— and to stay out longer than any other to _continue_ killing them until the darkness forces him to cede.

Nicolò does not know if it’s the lie inside his silence that burns him so, or if it’s the awful feeling that he might be _inspiring_ others to take even more aggressive action.

Either way, the guilt is acid and it sits heavy in his gut.

It’s as he’s waiting for his Saracen to arrive one morning that Nicolò realizes he’s been sleeping better since they arrived at Jerusalem than he had been in the year since he’d joined the siege at Antioch, _much_ better.

It’s as he spots his Saracen cutting away from the main skirmish on the weakest, lowest point of Jerusalem’s walls that Nicolò realizes that his improved sleep is likely the result of an eased conscience regarding the reduced sinfulness of his actions.

Nicolò hasn’t killed anyone besides his Saracen in over a week, and as the fearsome demon won’t _stay_ dead Nicolò’s conscience feels relatively clear of that concern.

It’s his distraction over that revelation that keeps Nicolò’s reflexes unusually sluggish as the fight begins. He dies first that day in nearly every engagement with the Saracen.

Of course, he gets his own licks in as he falls— enough to kill his opponent and ensure they, once more, fall together.

As that particular day drags on, with Nicolò’s reflexes slow and his thoughts in disarray, Nicolò hears more of the Saracen’s words.

They might be taking longer and longer between each engagement, or the Saracen might just be extra-talkative. Either way, the words are coming at a far higher count than usual, and while they’re being delivered with the same fierce hatred, there’s an edge of desperation in the Saracen’s tone that makes Nicolò think his gibberish is not exclusively a string of insults.

The man seems to be rotating through various language as he speaks, because Niccolò can interpret far more words than he usually picks up on and he knows his Arabic has not improved so substantially that the change today lies in _him_.

The man truly _isn’t_ yelling pure obscenities that afternoon.

He’s asking questions.

Questions for which Nicolò has no good answers to give… questions he’d asked himself with answers given by his superiors and the speakers of the Church (the very mouthpieces of his God on earth)[1], but answers which Nicolò no longer felt certain that he could trust entirely.

The Saracen was asking **_why_.**

Why did the pilgrims have to come at all?

Why did they come to fight, to _kill,_ so brutally?

Why did they choose to pillage and loot? To Rape, destroy, and massacre?

And then the Saracen asks a question Nicolò is certain he has heard wrong, or misinterpreted due to the gaps in his understanding of the warrior’s languages.

He asks, _‘why must you kill all us ‘ **heathens** ’ when the God we worship is the same?’_

The surprise and horror and utterly devastating confusion Nicolò feels as his muddled mind finally manages to parse the question nearly knocks him over.

It certainly weakens his knees enough to be the reason that his Saracen manages to topple him when his scimitar is blocked by a hasty parry from Nicolò’s great sword[2].

Nicolò dies on his back with the Saracen’s blade carving up his gut.

He gets his dagger into the Saracen’s thigh— deep enough to feel the hot spray of blood from the critical vessels. He fades into the gloom of death long before the Saracen falls, but he’s as confident as ever that he managed to ensure that their deaths are twined together.

Something bright and alarmed inside the Saracen’s dark eyes stays with him as Nicolò sinks peaceably into the Dark.

\- - - - -

\- - - - -

The weeks drag on at Jerusalem.

The Siege is as nightmarish as any other and Yusuf is just _so_ tired of it.

The Frankish army is not the only one to have ever committed acts of evil in the midst of war, but they’re the only army Yusuf’s had to witness going at it.

These Christians are the only ones Yusuf has ever seen so thoroughly _enjoy_ it.

He hates them all with a depth of passionate rage he has never felt before.

He hates _one,_ in particular— the one who won’t stay dead.

Why Allah chose to grant Yusuf this miracle of immortality, Yusuf cannot even begin to contemplate. But why Allah chose to place the very same blessing on this vile _Frank_ of all possibilities is a mystery that Yusuf cannot believe he will ever be content to just accept as part of Allah’s grand universal plan.

Yusuf and his Frank find each other on the battlefield without fail, every single day.

And every single day, they fight and kill each other. And then they rise again to start their unending dance all over again, repeatedly.

And it _is_ a dance.

Yusuf’s never seen a fighter more graceful or precise than this Frank.

His every movement is smooth and swift and devastating.

The strange choreography of his whirling fighting style would have drawn admiration in isolation, but the efficacy with which that style is employed makes the warrior phenomenal.

Yusuf’s Frank is a worthy opponent for him.

And he is a well-deserving target for the inexhaustible hatred Yusuf’s bears for all the people of his kind.

If it is Allah’s will that they will fight and kill each other over and over unto eternity, Yusuf will be more than happy to oblige.

He lays the Christian’s sins at his feet every day they battle.

The Frank, in turn, never speaks a word.

That blankness and unnerving calm he carries with him, that he exhibits even in the heat of battle, only makes Yusuf more inspired to spout vitriol.

And then, a bit more than three weeks into this endeavor— into the daily ritual of Yusuf sneaking out of Jerusalem before the day’s fighting truly starts to seek out his Frank at the low rise that has become their usual arena— Yusuf is delayed.

From the very top of Jerusalem’s north balustrade, looking away from where his Frank usually meets him, Yusuf spies a caravan. The traders are clearly intent on giving the Holy City a wide berth, but they hadn’t spaced themselves away nearly far enough to save themselves.

Yusuf is not the only one to have seen them.

But he’s the only one who might’ve wanted to help.

The only other eyes that find them are those of the invaders.

Yusuf is too far away to hear the screaming, too far to even see any of what happens very clearly. But his imagination supplies him with more than enough detail.

He cannot tear his gaze away for several long minutes, and when he does manage, Yusuf knows it’s only because Allah granted him a spark of strength to do it.

Yusuf goes to meet his Frank in a fouler mood than ever before.

Perhaps it is yet another sign that he is destined to rise to the challenge Allah has laid before him to kill this unkillable Frankish demon, to kill him thoroughly enough to make it stick.

Perhaps if he can manage such a feat, the rest of the Frankish force will fall along with him. It’s not a likely possibility, but neither is the one where a man can be killed repeatedly.

By the time Yusuf arrives at the low rise that has become their daily battleground, the Frank is already waiting for him. He has the big sword drawn, the one he wields in two-handed motions that look slow but somehow manage to keep a thick blade of steel between Yusuf’s swifter blade and the Frank’s soft belly. And the heavy sword makes Yusuf’s arms quake with every blow he manages to block.

Yusuf much prefers the days when he wields the skinny sword.

It is much more honorable to be killed by a skillful dance than by the sheer bulk of barely sharpened, over-weighted metal.

And their bouts usually extend for a far longer duration when the Frank dances with the skinny sword and dagger, which always makes for a more satisfying victory— even when the Frank manages to kill him in return before he finishes his fall.

Today, though, the Frank seems off balance.

Perhaps today will be the day that Yusuf finally kills him thoroughly enough to keep him dead. Perhaps today will be the day that Yusuf kills him while escaping death himself. Perhaps _that_ is the key to ending this cycle.

They kill each other no less than 11 times as the hours drag on.

Yusuf kills the Frank with as much brutality as he can muster— attempting to take out the frustration he feels at his impotence in the larger struggle raging around them. He uses _his_ Frank as an outlet for all the rage he feels on behalf of that poor caravan of traders, of the women and children and innocents being _massacred_ by the Christians’ hands.

He mourns for those same innocents being butchered by war-blind members of his _own_ side[3], committing atrocities in the fog of war that should never be claimed as done under any name of Allah. Not even Al-Qahhār, the _Subduer_ or _Absolute Vanquisher_[4], nor Al-Kāfiḍ, the _Abaser_ or _Humiliator_[5], or even Al-Muntaqim, the _Avenger **[6]**_.

This conflict did not _have_ to happen.

This horror was brought to these shores in aggression and pride and possessive intolerance that seems to defy the very teachings these Christians supposedly follow.

Yusuf has learned about much of the world in his years of trading at his Father’s and Brothers’ sides. He has learned that most differences of the people gathered around the Mediterranean are more about interpretation than substantive disputes.

He has met people from further east and further south than many people in this world have ever ventured and he has encountered religious systems that don’t even resemble what the petty crowds huddled at the shores of albahr almutawasit[7] call irreconcilably divided religions.

Yusuf makes demands of his invader, jumping between every language he knows as he asks countless versions of _why._

He doesn’t expect the Frank to answer.

He doesn’t even expect the Frank to understand.

Yusuf doesn’t expect anything but to vent his frustrations.

But then he asks about the insanity of Muslim’s being heathens when they worship what is essentially the very same God, and he asks it in a northerly vernacular of Sabir.

The Frank blinks with a startled understanding.

And then his infuriatingly captivating sea-glass green eyes widen with a different sort of shock in newfound comprehension. And alarmed confusion.

The Frank falters in his swing to block Yusuf’s thrust, and neglects to raise his blade again for any kind of riposte or parry.

Yusuf’s mind almost thinks the Frank might want to answer his question.

But Yusuf’s honed instincts and well-conditioned body react only to the reveal of an obvious opening in the Frank’s defense.

Yusuf stabs the Frank through the belly and drags his scimitar up and across his entire torso— coming to within inches of entirely diving the man into disconnected halves.

The Frank barely manages to respond.

He digs his dagger into Yusuf’s thigh, but the blow is feeble. Yusuf doesn’t think he even dies from it. He’s pretty sure he doesn’t even really pass out. He just falls and breathes deeply through the pain of letting his skin and fat and muscle knit itself back together.

Minutes later, his skin is entirely unblemished, and he hasn’t even a sore spot to prove the muscle was ever tender from a brutal puncture. He’s tired down to his bones, but that’s it.

The look on his Frank’s face as he died that time haunts Yusuf as he wakes.

Yusuf sits beside the dead invader, folded over his legs with his elbows on his raised knees and his head hung between them.

The invader had looked truly shocked at the idea that their gods might be the same. If he truly is so ignorant as that… if they _all_ are…

But they probably _are_ … because the people on Yusuf’s own side certainly are…

And those _eyes_ … even beneath the helmet, those eyes _screamed_ at Yusuf with just as much emotive power as any words that Yusuf had been spewing.

Aside from how both he and the Frank couldn’t seem to die correctly, those eyes would probably have kept Yusuf captivated for an uncomfortably long period of time.

Those eyes spoke words beyond measure that pulled at the artist deep in Yusuf’s soul.

Perhaps Allah had brought them together for another reason, one that didn’t involve killing and dying just to wake and kill and die again…

Allah _is_ the _Resurrector,_ Al-Ba’ith[8]. It’s is by Allah’s will alone that both Yusuf and the invader die and rise again.

Allah is As-Salam, the _Perfect Giver of Peace **[9]**_ , and Al-Jaami’, the _Uniter **[10]**_ …

Perhaps they couldn’t kill each other because they were not meant to… perhaps they could not kill each other because they were meant to find an accord their brethren could not.

It’s as that thought hits him that Yusuf realizes that the invader is still dead beside him.

Yusuf is healed and whole, while the invader yet lies cooling as a corpse.

Yusuf frowns to see it.

He pulls the invader’s helmet off and pokes his pale face in question.

He looks at the invader’s belly, sees it mostly healed… or at least the skin has knitted back together well enough to make it _look_ healed.

And yet, the invader is still dead.

Yusuf blinks down a burst of surprise at the _concern_ that observation claws out of him.

Perhaps he’s wrong, and perhaps it was simply a matter of killing the Frank without being killed by him in turn that allowed one of them to finally die.

Perhaps Yusuf’s gift of undone mortality is gone now, as well.

He almost wants to test it.

He’s just _so_ **_tired_**.

But to kill himself would be to snub a gift of Allah, to dare the presumption of knowing what is best for himself better than Al-‘Aleem, the _All-Knowing **[11]**_.

So, Yusuf doesn’t test his potentially restored mortality.

He simply sits by the dead Frank and… _waits_ …

Evening thickens into nightfall around them.

They’ve stayed out later with each other this day than on any other thus far.

Yusuf will have to wait another few hours until night settles in completely before he can risk sneaking back into Jerusalem.

And sitting by the body of a dead Frank will not make that task any easier as the invaders begin prowling the fields of carnage looking for loot as much as they might be looking for survivors… If they spot him and his Frank…

Yusuf doesn’t even want to finish the thought in his mind.

Instead, he decides to move a bit down the hill, away from the city and behind a low outcropping of rock that will hide his shape in the glow of desert moonlight.

He decides, inexplicably, to take the Frank with him.

He does so without ceremony or comfort, simply moving him by grasping at the dead man’s gauntlet-clad wrist and hauling his body across the dusty stone. If anyone could see the blood trail, their hiding spot would be ousted in a second, but Yusuf doesn’t think even the most energetic of invaders would wander out this far without seeing movement to entice them near.

Once they get their silhouettes out of sight, they should be safe enough.

Well, the Frank is still dead… so _he’s_ probably the safest of them all.

Yusuf sits with his back against the cooling stone, soaking in the last of the sun’s warmth as true dark begins to seep into the desert plains. His head is tipped back and his gaze is on the stars, but his thoughts swim with visons of the Frank in battle.

To die _forever_ from this… from the surprise of a taunt that should not have so thoroughly distracted him, that really was meant to be a genuine question… it seems… _unfitting_ of the warrior’s abilities. Yusuf would be proud to have claimed the life he is owed, but… but he would have preferred it to have been by a more empirically impressive manner, one that had been more decisively _fair_ as he claimed victory.

But… perhaps he is not yet fully dead, his belly is healed enough to have held together while Yusuf dragged him a dozen meters across the dusty stone.

And Yusuf has been killed before without the Frank being present. He’d died at least three times at Edessa when he’d detoured there after leaving Antioch. The city had been captured earlier in 1098[12], but it had been in an odd state of limbo while the Prince supposedly governing it had been slaughtering children at Antioch[13].

Yusuf had hoped the Prince would remain distracted long enough for Yusuf to do some good in the benighted city he had claimed by brutal, bloody force to be his own.

The Prince had _not_ remained distracted.

But Yusuf had still been able to do some good.

He’d helped dozens of families escape on caravans heading to the relative safety of Aleppo. And he’d helped dozens of traders _from_ Aleppo smuggle food and critical wares _into_ Edessa without the Prince’s vicious forces catching wind.

He’d been killed twice by the Prince’s soldiers.

Three times by bandits (one of which was a band of Muslim origin), all taking advantage of the chaos and cruelty of war to turn a petty profit.

He’d also died at least once of dehydration.

And possibly once of exposure.

But each time, he’d returned to living— as whole and unblemished as he’d been the very first day he’d died.

Perhaps it was because he’d needed to have been killed by or to kill the Frank _himself_ without the other of them dying. Perhaps _that_ had been the trick of it.

It would make a bit more sense of what is happening, but Yusuf doesn’t like it.

He doesn’t like it at all.

He sits there with his logic running him in pointless circles like a chicken in a dust storm.

He sits there until his toes grow cold and his contorted legs begin a tingling decline into going fully numb at the unwelcome lack of motion.

He sits there until the Frank shudders back to life beside him, gasping desperately with that ache of confusion and disoriented fear.

The Frank remembers where he is, or _was_ rather, and realizes he’s no longer there.

His sword (and dagger) had fallen from his hand and Yusuf hadn’t carried his weapons when dragging the Frank over here. The frantic slap of the Frank’s hands at the dimly lit stone around him shows a distinct lack of understanding for that oversight.

He still has a second sword though, and he draws it in an awkward motion as he rises with a gawkish grace to his feet, blade angled right at Yusuf’s throat.

Yusuf doesn’t react.

He’s too busy struggling to comprehend the relief that hit him when the Frank shuddered back to life. He should not be _relieved_ that his enemy still breathes.

And yet he _is_.

He is relieved and he is breathing.

They both are.

And will likely continue to be alive and well enough.

Together, paired by fate somehow…

_Inshallah_ , Yusuf thinks, _As Allah wills it **[14]**_.

The Frank pants heavily as he struggles to reorient. He recognizes that Yusuf is not showing any aggression towards him and cautiously lowers the point of his sword.

“ _Perchè **[15]**,_” the Frank asks in that lilting, indecipherable language of his— the one most of his kind don’t use. “ _Che ragione **[16]**_?”

The meaning is clear enough as he looks around in such blatantly expressed confusion that Yusuf isn’t entirely sure Allah isn’t translating the words in his ears.

_Why am I **here**?_

Yusuf shrugs.

He doesn’t have the words in that language to explain it, or in the other Christian tongue, or even in Sabir. He would barely have the words in Arabic to say what he’d been thinking, and even then he’d be too embarrassed by his lack of comprehension to own up to the lack of solid rationale behind his defacto decision.

“ _Manum tuam in Pache **[17]**_?” he asks, switching to that choppier language the bulk of the Christians seem to use day to day. He moves his weaponless hand between them rapidly, flat and open palmed towards the dirt between their boots. From another, Yusuf would consider it aggressive. From _this_ Frank… well, it holds a very different sense. “ _Pax nōbīscum **[18]**_?”  
  


_Pax_. Yusuf knows that word, it’s in some regional slants of Sabir. It means _Peace_.

_Peace between us?_

Yusuf shrugs again.

The Frank huffs. Then takes a few steps back and sheathes his sword.

He waits for Yusuf to react and when Yusuf does nothing, he huffs again and turns away on his heel, stalking off to collect his weapons and presumably return to his camp.

Yusuf lets him go.

\- - - - -

**Historical Notes:**

> [1] At this time, a good portion of people genuinely thought that Confession, or even just talking to a priest was a direct conversation with God. Like how older kids no longer believe the mall Santa /IS/ Santa, but they still believe the Mall ones act as direct conduits to the big guy. And for priests, talking to a higher church member, it was like having an express line to God’s office, with seniority and priority in play. And answers were trusted //implicitly//.
> 
> [2] Niccolò’s longsword of Damascus steel is his usual weapon, but I mentioned he got a Crusader Greatsword, and I’m having him use it here because the two-handed technique is better for a warrior when fighting muddled. It’s bigger and blocks lighter blades with more ease, and it’s less nuanced to kill with, being that it’s much more like a heavy cleaver than a precision rapier. Many greatswords actually have pretty blunt edges, comparatively, because their ‘blades’ are often more about concentrating a huge force into small areaà they don’t so much /cut/ and slice as they do /cleave/ and split like a log-spreader. They’re also easier to maintain in protracted battle campaigns.
> 
> [3] While it was terrifyingly common to have atrocities committed after warfare in the ancient world, on both sides of any conflict, the Crusades were particularly brutal because of the religious/ethnic-cleansing aspect. However, I personally, have not found too many records detailing Muslim justifications for massacres like Tyre (996 CE), Taormina (962 CE), or Rometta (963 CE), so in the following sentence where I go into the names of Allah used to justify atrocities, I’m using research into Jihadist justifications to support the decision for unforgivable, aggressive actions. The mindsets are not quite the same, but the term Jihad _was_ applied to this conflict in this era. Muslim teachings are, by and large, the most peaceful of those from the 3 major modern religions and independent religious justification for such horror is scarce unless you devote more time than I ever have to the task. The Islam of 1099 CE is also much closer to modern Islam than modern Christianity is to 1099 CE Christianity, so I feel the leap isn’t unbearably distant. That said, I’m a fairly topical theologian, and if you disagree with the names I have selected, please let me know (and understand that neither I, nor my depiction of Yusuf, agree with the invocation of these names in violence, discrimination, hate, or any other evil act).
> 
> [4] One of the 99 names of Allah in Muslim teachings: اَلْقَهَّار (al-qahhār) – The Subduer, The Overcomer, The Conqueror, The Absolute Vanquisher.
> 
> [5] One of the 99 names of Allah in Muslim teachings: اَلْخَافِض (al-ḵāfiḍ) – The Abaser, the Humiliator
> 
> [6] One of the 99 names of Allah in Muslim teachings: اَلْمُنْتَقِم (al-muntaqim) – The Avenger
> 
> [7] Albahr almutawasit = The Mediterranean Sea in Modern Arabic, as provided by Google Translate (البحر المتوسط), again Arabic is not one of the languages I speak fluently or confidently, but I know enough to usually trust that I can fiddle with the Google grammar properly. However, if you notice something’s off, please tell me! ^_^ I’m having Joe use the Arabic here because while ‘Mediterranean’ is fairly literal for ‘sea in the middle of land’ and would’ve been a vaguely plausible term for the body of water at the time, the Roman roots of the local language were still pervasive enough in 1099 CE that the Italian ethnicities in the region would still have called it the Mare Nostrum (literally “our sea” in Latin) and Yusuf would NEVER call it that.
> 
> [8] One of the 99 names of Allah in Muslim teachings: ٱلْبَاعِثُ (al-ba’ith), the Resurrector, Raiser of the Dead.
> 
> [9] One of the 99 names of Allah in Muslim teachings: ٱلْسَّلَامُ (as-salam), the Perfect Giver of Peace.
> 
> [10] One of the 99 names of Allah in Muslim teachings: ٱلْجَامِعُ (al-jaami’), the Gatherer, the Uniter.
> 
> [11] One of the 99 names of Allah in Muslim teachings: ٱلْعَلِيمُ (al-‘aleem), the All-Knowing, Omniscient.
> 
> [12] Yusuf would not be using modern, western calendar dating to determine timelines. He would be using Hijiri years, in the Anno Hegirae, Muslim lunar calendar. 1099 CE would be 492 AH, but that dating system is extremely confusing to readers when thrown in for toss-away comments, so I’m making note of the year that Yusuf would know the date by without distracting from the main narrative in case readers aren’t inclined to reframe their entirely calendar understanding for a single side comment.
> 
> [13] Yusuf is actually misinformed here. Baldwin of Boulogne, third son of the northern French County of Boulogne-sur-Mer, was named the first Count of Edessa and remained there while the Crusader armies moved south, his defense of the region and distraction of Kerbogha is what caused Kerbogha’s reinforcement troops to arrive 2 weeks too late at Antioch to be effective at resisting Crusader conquest. Yusuf’s confusion stems from 2-fold misinformation: first, the next-move after Antioch was a HUGH source of disagreement among Crusader leadershipà to the point that other people noticed and wrote about it. AND Baldwin was a jackass, but he was also pretty good at his job, so Edessa was actually in a state of relative-not-awful compared to all its neighbors.
> 
> [14] Arabic saying, used rather liberally in modern times to mean anything from a gentle prayer (like Christian supper blessings on neighbors) to a casual wish, إِنْ شَاءَ ٱللَّٰهُ, (inshallah), was originally a much more formal and significant saying, more along the lines a formal plea—not like _direly_ formal, but more like Christian Confession than a supper blessing. Also, it’s used to speak of events that may unfold in the future, particularly human hopes for how Allah will allow events to unfold. Yusuf’s tense here is an odd one, it’s Future Perfect Passive Continuous (yes, I know Arabic tenses don’t officially have that tense, but, linguistically, that tense is what this meaning is getting at). It means he’s talking of a continuously occurring event that has, from Allah’s view, has already happened, but from Yusuf’s view will be done to him (ie, whatever happens in the future can only play out, because Allah has already willed it, and now Yusuf will passively have that future enacted upon him, with a vague thread of hope that the future that’s unfolding will have Nicky in it somehow).
> 
> [15] Modern Italian Translation of ‘Why?’.
> 
> [16] Italian Translation of ‘What Reason?’, ‘che’ is hyper-casual, but ‘ragione’ is more formal and slightly archaic in this particular usage. Follows Gallo-Italic (Ligurian / Zeneize) Linguistic principles to the best of my knowledge.
> 
> [17] Latin for ‘your hand in peace’. Church-Latin speakers will be more familiar with Pax Vobiscum (or even Pax Tibi, which is, grammatically, very wonky) , from the ‘peace be with you’ bit of the Mass ritual, but /Manum Tuam in Pace/ is a phrase occasionally in discussion of treaty-making, which is what is happening here. Manum Tuam is accusative, and acts as the object. The verb is missing, assumed to be an interrogative ‘est’ meaning ‘is’.
> 
> [18] Latin for ‘Peace with Us’, ‘Pax’ for ‘peace’, ‘nōbīscum’ as the anastrophe of ‘nobis’, the ablative of ‘nos’ meaning ‘us’ and ‘cum’ meaning ‘with’. The verb is missing, assumed to be an interrogative ‘est’ meaning ‘is’.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you guys so much for sticking with me even though I didn't post last week! We're finally getting further inside these idiots' heads and those heads are actually starting to think about important things!
> 
> I will definitely be able to post next week's chapter on schedule as planned, fyi. I promise! But for now, I hope you liked this one and I wish you all a safe and fabulous Mardi Gras!
> 
> NEXT TIME: More teamwork and then, FINALLY, the poor boys leave the bloody battlefield. They're still more like enemy combatants than not, but there IS an edge of camaraderie beginning to build between them.


	5. Blood of the Sacrament

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Siege at Jerusalem continues, but something ELSE changes and it shifts a few significant details about Joe and Nicky's diametric perspectives.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You guys have been so AWESOME!  
> I swear I'll be answering all your comments, but real life is pretty complicated at the moment, so it may take a while still.
> 
> This one gets a bit ickier than the others thus far, digging a bit more thoroughly into that nastiness of protracted war campaigns circa 1099 CE, so brace for that. But it's also a good moment of both Nicky and Joe facing turning points in their current belief structures!

Chapter 5: Blood of the Sacrament

Eventually, Yusuf manages to find the will to get to his feet.

Eventually, it’s late enough for him to use the secret, narrow passages that can take a careful individual who is willing to be contorted and uncomfortable, back inside the city.

_Eventually_ , Yusuf makes his way to the abandoned house he’s been living out of… because it has a bed and a door and is mostly quiet. At the very least, he can’t hear the constant screams and moans of the injured like he can in the areas of the city where most of the formal groups of soldiers are camped.

Yusuf feels a little bad about his invasive residence, but this family had probably left well before the siege. The family’s belongings were packed with care, nothing had been broken or left haphazardly upended in a frantic exit. They possibly even expected to come back one day.

If Yusuf availed himself of their beds, he only did so while clean-washed.

And if Yusuf gifted portions of their food to his own belly, he only did so with the goods that would have gone to rot in a mere month ahead as time progressed— would’ve gone on to spoil the other goods in the stores.

And if Yusuf pocketed a few pieces of charcoal… well, that was between his own heart and the soul of an artist Allah had filled his body with. He had a sketchbook on him, with plenty of blank pages left, but good charcoal was unconscionably difficult to come by.

It was also between his own heart and soul and Allah, Al-Wahhaab, _the Giver of Gifts **[1]**_ , if Yusuf took a moment to settle his mind after the day he’d had by sketching out his Frank’s figure as he’d stalked across the moonlit battlefield— shoulders bent with the weight of doubt and crisis, weapons caked in blood but with enough white-ish space left on his tunic to make the bloody cross embroidered across his chest and back[2] starkly visible, borne like a physical thing.

His expression blank, but his eyes ablaze.

Yusuf doesn’t get it _quite_ right, doesn’t match the picture in his mind to the one he gets down on paper, doesn’t reproduce the tableau quite perfectly… but he gets close. The Frank looks for all the world to be a hero in some horrific Greek tragedy, doomed but somehow valiant in his keen despair.

The sketch is enough to settle Yusuf’s mind, somehow.

It means he can slip into sleep without his usual trouble with settling down.

It means he can slip into his dreams without preamble or caution.

Yusuf dreams of the Frank.

It’s not, in any way, a new occurrence… but the dreams this time are _different_.

They’re not glimpses of where the Frank is or what he’s doing (not like the glimpses that feel plausible and present and _real_ enough to be more _visions_ than dreams). This time, the dreams are softer… warm and sweet in a way Yusuf can’t place.

He can’t quite remember what they were about, exactly, when he wakes, but he can recount with colorful creativity the way whatever happened made him feel _alive_.

Yusuf wakes invigorated.

He marches out to meet his Frank on their usual field of battle with a lightness in his step he hasn’t felt since the day before his father and brother left Tunis for the last time.

The low rise of their battleground, stained in so much of their blood, is as familiar and strangely welcoming a sight as any fruit stand on a street corner in Yusuf’s memory. Stepping up to where he will meet his Frank in combat once again is suddenly not a trial, but a respite from the agony of existing elsewise in this siege.

Except… his Frank is not there.

His Frank _continues_ to not be there… until well into the morning’s skirmishing.

Until noon and then _after_ noon…

Yusuf begins pacing around midday.

It’s impossible to pin down what makes him stay in the vicinity, but stay he does.

And _eventually_ his ridiculous opposite _does_ appear.

The Frank is without his helmet, and Yusuf can see his face more clearly than he ever has before. The sight is strangely arresting. The Frank is sweaty and bearing a fresh spray of lifeblood (probably, based on the pattern, none of the new stains are from blood that was recently his own), and it makes Yusuf intolerably cross to see.

“'ant mtakhr[3]!” Yusuf shouts at him, making wide gesticulations to get his point across despite knowing full well that the lout speaks not a word of Arabic. “dam min tartadi[4]?”

Yusuf brandishes his scimitar at the man with a threateningly ferocious gesture, but the warrior is too astute a fighter to see the gesture as anything but stick waving, as one might do to frighten an annoying dog.

Yusuf knows his fury should go deeper than it feels at the moment, he should be aggrieved by the fact that his Frank was killing his countrymen— spilling yet more Muslim blood across the sand and ending the lives of people doing nothing more unholy than defending their homes. But, in this exact second, Yusuf is more annoyed that the Frank wasn’t _here_ , to kill and be killed by Yusuf in their usual fruitless contest.

The Frank, absurdly, half- _bows_ to him, waving his arm in a wide gesture that looks very much like it could be an apology as he jabbers uselessly, “ _Mie scusa, Saracen. Il mio comportamento… Sono stato incauto. Comandante mio… lui era insospettito; ebbi stato tenuto vicino_ —[5].” He waves his hands again, urgently. “— _Ma, ma, ma! Ho scoperto che la fine è vicina. Ci sarà molto sangue. Devi evacuare. **[6]**_ ”

“Evacua…?” Yusuf repeats, mulling the word over. It sounds just familiar enough to make him think he’s heard it before.

The Frank nods with more urgency, bolstered by enthusiasm at Yusuf’s recognition. He runs his fingers through his bloody hair—which Yusuf finds oddly distracting—and mumbles frenetically, “ _Evacuare, evacua… Decederetur? Ti Decederetir? Evadere, Ti evadetir? **[7]**_ ”

_Escape. Evacuate._

The Frank wants Yusuf to make his people abandon the city.

“ _Qui civilian. Senes, et mulieres, et parvi… Ti evadetir **[8]**,_” the Frank insists. “ _Ni omni occidir_ … _tha eínai mia **sfagí** **[9]**._”

**_Sfagí._**

Yusuf knows enough Greek to know that word, even rarely as the concept of a massacre came up in his travels with his Father as a merchant.

“ _Ópos i Antiócheia. Perissótero. Polý perissótero **[10]**,_” the Frank is saying, still in choppy Greek that barely gets his point across.

But it _does_ get his point across.

He’s saying that when the Franks, these horrid, vicious Christians, get inside the walls of Jerusalem (an inevitability Yusuf can’t make himself pretend away at this point) it’s going to be a bloodbath. Like at Antioch, the Christians won’t spare any of the civilian population.

They’re going to kill them.

They’re going to kill them _all._

And this Frank is… is _warning_ Yusuf about it, telling him to evacuate his people.

Yusuf squints at him, suspicious.

Speaking as slowly as he can in his own choppy Greek, Yusuf asks why the Frank would deign to help the so-called heathens in the Holy City.

A look crosses the invader’s face as he comprehends the words… a look that is so arresting, Yusuf feels his whole being stutter. The depths of shame and regret in that expression, the _pain_ in those expressive, green-glass eyes… it communicates more than even a copious string of fluently spoken words in elegant poetic verse could ever manage.

“ _Imshaellah_[11],” he stumbles out, accent horrific. “… _lays hadha_...[12]”

Yusuf stares at him.

Fury beginning to boil up inside him at the ridiculous idea of this _Frank_ having any way to know what Allah might will, but he pants through the rage as he recognizes that… _yes_ , the Frank knows he shouldn’t speak with authority on the thoughts of Allah’s mind, but he also knows that _no_ god, no _reasonable_ god, could _possibly_ want horror like _this_ for His children.

The swords at the invader’s sides are still sheathed, the crossbow at his back is still slung away and empty of bolts, and the man’s hands are wide while his head is bowed.

Yusuf could decapitate him.

Yusuf could kill him a hundred different ways, and he strongly considers most of them, but he also knows that he could repay the Frank’s small favor with the sort of grace granted by Ar-Raheem, the _Bestower of Mercy **[13]**_.

“ 'ana 'aqbil tahdhirik[14],” he growls eventually, lowering the tip of his scimitar.

The Frank’s chest heaves as he looks up, relief clear in his face even though Yusuf is certain his words are beyond the soldier’s comprehension. His body language and tone must be adequate enough to convey his core thoughts.

“ _Posso aiutir **[15]**_?”

Yusuf sneers venomously at the audacity of this Frank, thinking he could _help_.

“Ti aiutir arketa,[16]” he spits, turning his back.

Yusuf hears the man sigh heavily as he heads back towards Jerusalem.

It will be difficult to get back inside with the sun still in the sky, but Yusuf knows the Frank is right. The Siege towers the Franks are constructing are almost complete, their new catapults have already been put to devastating use… the end is imminent. And Yusuf’s people are in grave danger.

He will go to whatever extremes he must in order to save as many of them as possible.

And yet, a small piece of his mind lingers on the fate of the Frank who warned him.

The worry is bizarre when considering his surety that neither of them will be able to die and stay dead, regardless of how bloody this next phase of warfare becomes.

But the worry is present, nonetheless.

It lingers in a corner of his soul even as Yusuf forcibly pushes it out of his thoughts.

\- - - - -

\- - - - -

When Nicolò woke with the unkillable Saracen sitting beside him in the dark, he’d fumbled to his feet in pure desperation to address the threat.

But when the threat the man usually showed him had not materialized, Nicolò offered peace… and had found his offer more or less accepted.

It leaves him feeling off balance as he makes his way back to the camp on the Holy City’s southwest side. It’s not the largest of the Crusader camps, but it’s the one where most of his countrymen are arranged— the Genoese forces that had marched from Antioch had joined those who’d sailed to Jaffa when the fresh blood had arrived with the materials and designs for the most devastating siege engines Nicolò has ever heard of.

The commanders of the force were far less unknown to Nicolò, which only made them all the more worrisome for him to sleep beside.

Guglielmo Embriaco and his older brother Primo di Castello[17] would soon be attacking to the North with Godfrey of Boullion and the main force, but as the consummate entrepreneurs they were, the Embriaci Family[18] was keenly aware of what building a friendship with Raymond of Toulouse[19] could mean for them once the war was over.

Nicolò had known both brothers from his childhood back in Genoa. Primo di Castello is about 20 years Nicolò’s senior[20], but at the stuffy Court functions he’d attended as a child Primo had been a welcome friend and mentor[21].

Guglielmo is, likewise, about 20 years Nicolò’s senior[22], and he proves far more unapproachable and intimidating here in the bloody, soiled desert around Jerusalem than he ever had been at Court in Genoa.

Guglielmo had been sticking very close to his siege engines[23], overseeing their construction directly, while ingratiating himself with Godfrey of Bouillon— saying things about purging the Holy City of the Saracens’ filthy presence with a sort of casual bloodlust that made Nicolò shudder to even consider.

Primo was a bit less extreme in his declarations, but he had been carefully maneuvering himself to grow closer to Raymond of Toulouse and he, too, had been speaking with a casual dismissal of the humanity in those who currently lived behind Jerusalem’s walls in a manner that made Nicolò balk and shiver.

Things had changed with the Embracios since Nicolò had last seen them as a boy.

He had paid his respects to them when they’d arrived, and he has continued to do so whenever they passed his tent or joined a campfire where he was settled, but he hadn’t sought them out at all since the first time when propriety demanded he went to greet them on arrival.

Nicolò had hoped they hadn’t noticed his lack of Courtly camaraderie.

Or that they had dismissed his lackluster display of eagerness to renew Court ties as simple exhaustion and distraction— in the same way that his compatriots had dismissed his lack of a presence within the main skirmishes as a god-given drive to move out early and stay out late, along with the chaos of war simply hiding him from easy view.

He found out that night that they hadn’t.

Primo sought him out the moment he arrived back in the camp.

“Nicolò, amichetto mio[24],” he greeted, clapping Nicolò on the back as he arrived at the campfire Nicolò was still barely settled at. He proffered up a bowl of weak soup, a bone broth with some sort of chopped pasta. It was awful, but it was food— and so long as Nicolò didn’t let himself wonder where exactly the bones had come from he could usually pretend that there were still plenty of horses left to slaughter[25]… Especially when someone rich as Primo was concerned, who had brought a sizeable herd of well-fed animals for his own personal use.

It’s a helpful thought to allow him to force down the much-needed nourishment. His body is on the edge of starvation, and if he dared refuse a gift from Primo… Nicolò has been mostly untouched by the side-eyed suspicion of his fellows, but to dishonor Primo would be a far more offensive spark to stir rumors of disloyalty than anything else he’d yet done.

“You wear more blood than your body holds, as always,” Primo congratulates him, tone warm and proud in a way that makes it even more difficult for Nicolò to force his soup down.

“I do what I can to serve God,” Nicolò returns.

Primo nods with an effusive smile. “Indeed you do, and always you return without a scratch, amichetto,” Primo tells him, eyes glinting in the firelight with icy intent despite the smile still spread on his face. “The boys, you know, they’re whispering. They say you must be sent from God himself; another miracle, like Peter Bartholomew’s Holy Lance at Antioch[26].”

“I am just a man,” Nicolò responded, ducking his head but maintaining enough eye contact to hopefully convince Primo of his earnestness. Nicolò doesn’t know whether or not the statement is truly a lie, but he knew he could not let Primo think it one. “And I am a man trained by the very same masters that have allowed you to persevere without dire wounding.”

Primo’s darkly suspicious gaze does not relent.

“Where do you go, with such eagerness, each morning,” Primo asks in turn. “And where do you stay, so late, each night?”

“I go to pray,” Nicolò retorts immediately. “I’ve found a rise that makes me feel closer to God, and where I can see the golden light of the Holy City at sunrise. I remain there until the sun is fully up and God commands me forth to battle. I return once the fighting has finished to thank Him for sparing me and for giving me the strength to carry out His will.”

“I want to join you, on the morrow,” Primo states, issuing a clear command. “It will be good to feel closer to God in this city under the shadow of the heathen stain. We will stay close to each other, tomorrow, fight together as one— as we did against our fencing masters as boys.”

Nicolò ducks his head in a nod, using a spoonful of broth to dissuade the need for him to show a broad smile.

Primo sees his ascent and nods firmly.

Then he rises from his seat and disappears into the gloom to find his own campfire again. Nicolò is alone for several long minutes before he dares to swipe his hand over his face in a futile effort to wipe away the chilling dismay he feels.

He crawls into the tent he had been sharing with five other men at the start of the siege, and, for the very first time, he finds himself almost grateful that he is now alone inside it.

Nicolò falls asleep immediately, exhausted beyond words from having died and then returned over a dozen times that day.

As he sleeps, he dreams.

And as he dreams, he sees the Saracen— as has become far more common than not.

The dreams this time are different.

He has no flashes of the Saracen’s death at his hands, nor does his wishful thinking have him see them walking together through a peaceful market.

This time, he sees the man at prayer.

Or, at least, what Nicolò _thinks_ is prayer. The man is prostrate before what seems to be an alter, and he’s murmuring in rapid-fire under his breath in his own musical language. There’s a certain beauty to the prayer, Nicolò can acknowledge, and watching it feels intimate in a way that should make Nicolò self-conscious.

Instead, it makes him sad.

The people within Jerusalem’s walls are not all infidels who disdain the rightful God and the gift of his Son’s brief presence on earth. There are Christians inside these walls. There are Jews and Aramaic peoples… and even Muslims who mean the Christians no harm. While Nicolò feels for them, for the souls they don’t understand are lost in darkness away from God’s love, he does not wish them dead. He would convert them all, given ample time and opportunity.

Nicolò feels that he could do it, that he could lead them into the light from where they have wandered off astray.

Especially with the knowledge that _his_ Saracen had imparted on him before he died that last time today… the notion that _he_ considers their Gods to be one and the same.

The Saracen is _so close_ to becoming a true convert, and surely there must be plenty more besides him who feel the same…

Nicolò could _save_ them.

But he will likely not have a chance to even try.

And seeing the Saracen pray like this, Nicolò mourns the lost potential.

Soon after that, his dreams turn. There is a warmth in them, a _heat_. Dark eyes with such emotion as Nicolò can hardly comprehend, let alone name. A bright smile and a jolly laugh that speaks of countless years of long lives spent in growing an unfathomably close friendship.

All of it gets lost in the swirl of shame and disgust he feels at recalling how God put him here to _kill_ the Saracens, not befriend them.

Except… he _cannot_ kill them, well, he can’t kill _one_ of them…

If he were meant to kill the Saracen, Nicolò assumes that God would have granted him the strength to do so. Instead, they dance. It’s a doubt that has surfaced in him before…

They kill each other and die together and rise again as one.

Perhaps they are meant to be more than mere adversaries.

Perhaps they are meant to forge a new bond entirely, to begin something that could heal both of their peoples in the aftermath of the horror that is this ‘Holy War’.

God _cannot_ rejoice in seeing this slaughter.

God _cannot_ truly mean for his children to behave like such vile animals.

Nicolò wakes unsettled and restless, an hour before dawn.

He prepares himself for battle as the sky begins to pulse with a quiet lightening. As soon as he leaves his tent, Primo appears beside him, gaze hard and smile threatening.

Nicolò returns his greetings with a quiet somberness he hopes can be attributed to the early hour and having his thoughts already turned to prayer.

Nicolò leads Primo north, to a secluded spit of rock lifted above the nearby terrain, but still low enough to be hidden from the main camps. He’d found it on the very first day of the Siege and had genuinely thought it to be a good place for prayer, but he hadn’t returned since he’d found his Saracen and they’d begun their daily ritual of repeatedly killing and dying.

As the sky greys, Nicolò looks to Primo once and nods his head. Then he bows into the prostration due for sincere prayer and launches into the Liturgia Horarum[27].

Nicolò sings low, and works his way through Matins, Lauds, Prime, and Terce, taking his time to move through the proper gestures and to let the notes of his song hold weight.

It’s the first time he’s prayed since before Antioch.

It’s the first time he’s _ever_ prayed without even an internal pretense of meaning it.

Nicolò tries to lose himself in the comforting, familiar words, but peace eludes him.

He does not feel the presence of God around him as he used to when he lay supplicate.

He is not sure if the cause for his distance from God are the vile deeds he’s done in God’s name for this Crusade, or if it stems from his doubt that this Crusade could possibly be what God truly wills for His children.

Either way, Nicolò makes the prayers last until the fighting begins.

Then he draws his great sword, flashes Primo what he hopes is a convincing smile, and then charges in to join the fray.

Primo sticks infuriatingly close to him all morning.

Then in a lull in the fighting around midday, he flashes Nicolò a smile that makes Nicolò’s soul curl up like a sickly cat, low in his belly.

“You are as vicious as they say,” Primo praises. “Such fire, such God-given passion! I confess, amichetto, I doubted you. I feared your monkish ways were making you squeamish when Genoa needed you to feel a thirst for heathen blood, but I was so wrong to doubt! How I admire your ferocity, your unrivaled count of slain foes! Indeed, when these frightful walls are finally breached, would that I have you at my side as we move to purge the city of its sinners.”

“Purge it?”

“Of course, it will be a baptism! The streets will run with heathen blood and when not a wretched soul survives it, the Holy City will be reborn as pure as when Solomon first arrived upon the Mount to build his temple!”

“We will be killing all of them? Women and children, too,” Nicolò wonders, tone flat with suppressed horror. “Even those who are Christians, simply living here under heathen rule?”

“So eager! Of course, we will kill them all,” Primo tells him. “We must! God has sent us to purge these lands, and the misguided Christians living here, willingly, with heathen overlords are proof that it has been corrupted beyond saving. We kill and cleanse and all will be reborn together as we rise into a new era[28].”

“All for the Glory of His kingdom,” Nicolò responds when Primo looks to him for agreement— a crazed look of wild bloodlust in his eyes.

The surge of Saracens resumes in their direction just then, forcing the conversation to end. Nicolò slays countless foes, unable to even keep a tally as his mind reels.

He wants to throw up, not because of the belly he just opened in a man who could be a full decade his junior, but because of the even younger ones yet to be slain, the babes and infants who couldn’t possibly be held accountable for choices made by wayward parents…

Nicolò cannot kill them.

He cannot watch as his compatriots kill them.

He cannot be part of this slaughter.

With Primo’s suspicions waylaid, and his confidence in Nicolò restored, even as Nicolò’s own loyalties are in the midst of genuinely being turned, Primo allows himself to be separated a few yards from Nicolò’s side.

Nicolò takes advantage and widens the gap between them.

Over the course of the next… possibly an hour, though it feels like it could have been several more beyond just one, Nicolò manages to get himself away from Primo altogether. Lost in the crowd and chaos, Nicolò _finally_ manages to slip away from the skirmish entirely— though he cannot simply sprint to where he can only hope his Saracen is still waiting.

It takes an excruciating span of time to make his way to their usual battlefield, and he nearly collapses in relief as he spies his counterpart still present, pacing across their arena.

The Saracen spits curses at him as soon as he arrives.

Nicolò launches into an explanation as best he can.

Their words are jumbled and stilted, bolstered by hand gestures and emotive facial expressions. It takes too long when every second feels like an unforgivable delay, but eventually it seems Nicolò manages to communicate his meaning properly.

The Saracen may even _thank_ him for the warning.

Nicolò implores him for the chance to help.

The Saracen, quite clearly, refuses with disparaging disdain.

“ _Ti aiutir arketa_ ,” he spits, turning his back.

The meaning couldn’t be clearer to Nicolò, though he doesn’t know the words… _You’ve helped enough_ … Nicolò’s people are responsible for this carnage, that is how he’s ‘helped’ before this moment. It’s no wonder his ‘help’ is considered a dubious offer at best.

The Saracen leaves him at the edge of their arena without looking back.

Nicolò divests himself of the Crusader armor— of his Genovesi surcoat— and says a short prayer to beg forgiveness, as he finally admits to himself that he has truly turned deserter.

Then he moves to follow his Saracen across the desert.

The man has been getting in and out somehow, and Nicolò is determined to follow him inside now. His help may not be welcome, but he cannot be killed for attempting to give aid anyway. And his immortality may prove useful in attempting to sneak as many people out of Jerusalem as possible.

Either way, he _has_ to try.

\- - - - -

[1] One of the 99 names of Allah in Muslim teachings: ٱلْوَهَّابُ (al-wahhaab), the Giver of Gifts.

[2] Again, Niccolò would not be wearing a Templar Cross here, again that order wasn’t founded until 1119 CE. However, the Flag of Genoa, adopted in the early 900’s CE, looks suspiciously similar. The Genoese kitted out their people pretty well, so there would have been shields, hauberks, and surcoats with that heraldry (or rather vexillography, in this case) present as a national-origin emblem. Moreover, the Genoese soldiers arrived right before several key, big victories, so it makes sense that several histories assert that it, as a preexisting symbol of battles swaying in favor of the Crusaders’ inevitable victory, was simply co-opted and assimilated into an order of Knights that claimed the divine mission of being victorious (with minor tweaking, of course).

[3] 'ant mtakhr! ( !انت متاخر ) Modern Arabic for ‘you’re late’.

[4] dam min tartadi? ( دم من ترتدي؟ ) Modern Arabic for ‘Whose blood are you wearing?’, this one pulled purely from Google, as all I’ve got otherwise is a vague notion of ‘airtida’ for wear...

[5] I don’t speak Ligurian/Zeneize, and have no means of learning it, but I do study Linguistics and can nudge some translations into a more Zeneize-esque translation, but this set of sentences is in purely modern Italian. My Italian is not great, but I’ve got a fair handle. Here, Nicky’s saying, “I’m sorry, Saracen. My behavior… I was incautious. My commander… he became suspicious; I was kept close.” Note, the ‘ebbi stato’ is missing a subject on purpose, Nicky’s rambling informally and I felt the subject is well enough implied by the verb case.

[6] Again, this is in Modern Italian, and my grasp of such is not perfectly fluent. If I’ve butchered this, let me know! Here, Nicky’s saying, “However! I discovered that the end is near. It will be very bloody. You must evacuate.”

[7] This is Nicky going through bastardizations of Italian and Latin conjugations for the words ‘evacuate’ and ‘escape’, attempting to push them into the pidgin language of Sabir. I don’t speak the Sabir of 1099 CE, but I think what I get to is a pretty close estimation of the northern Mediterranean version of the modern dialect.

[8] Again, bastardization of Latin / Italian to pseudo-Sabir, saying, “the civilians, seniors, women, and children, you escape”. He goes on to add, “all will be killed.”

[9] The second half of this sentence (just the ‘ _tha eínai mia sfagí_ ’ is Modern Greek, translated by Google for ‘it will be a massacre’. Greek is another language where I can do little more than identify it by ear and order coffee.

[10] _Ópos i Antiócheia. Perissótero. Polý perissótero_ = Modern Greek, honestly just a Google translation for, “Like Antioch. More. Much more.”

[11] Nicky’s first attempt at ‘Inshallah’ ( إن شاء الله ), God wills it.

[12] Nicky then adds in Modern Arabic, ‘Not this..’ ( ليس هذا ).

[13] One of the 99 Names of Allah in Muslim teachings: ٱلْرَّحِيْمُ , Ar-Raheem, the Bestower of Mercy.

[14] Modern Arabic, as per Google Translate, for “I accept your warning.” ( أنا أقبل تحذيرك ).

[15] _Posso aiutir_ = Sabir-esque Bastardization of Modern Italian for, “May I help.”

[16] Ti aiutir arketa = Sabir-esqure Bastardization of Modern Italian for ‘you help’, and Modern Greek for ‘enough’.

[17] The prominent commanders of the Genoese force that arrived at Jerusalem from Jaffa with material and plans for what siege engines would eventually end the siege. I have not done too much research into the Embriaci Family, but most of the records I’ve dealt with label the pair this way, with Gugilelmo’s name taking precedence, despite being the younger brother. I believe it’s because Guglielmo is the more political of the two, and he seems to have become the primary Embriaci heir, while Primo is credited more with the design of the Siege Engines than with just about anything else.

[18] The Embriaci were Genoese nobility and //very// wealthy. This excursion to Jerusalem was privately funded and embarked upon almost purely to gain the family notoriety, wealth, and a kingly command of new territory, with the Crusade as a thin excuse for conflict. They originally set out for Ascalon, intending to simply conquer the city and claim it as their own for the Embriaco Family with vague fealty to Pope Urban II. They were repelled from Ascalon by a resistance force from Egypt. They honestly only seemed to have joined at Jerusalem to convince the leaders there to help them with conquering Ascalon (which also backfired on a grand scale).

[19] Guglielmo was closer friends to Godfrey of Bouillon than he was to Raymond of Toulouse, but Raymond was the richest of the commanders present at Jerusalem and there is zero chance that the Brothers Embriaci did not attempt to play both sides of the possibilities in developing contacts. Both Raymond and Godfrey participated in the eventual Siege of Ascalon, and both wanted to occupy it for their own. Neither could come to a decision beyond /not/ letting the Embriaci have it. They bribed the Embriaci Family very well to get them to relinquish their pseudo-claim. And the Pope paid handsomely to send the Family back in the Second Crusade, during which Genoa got more money in bribes-to-not-kill-civilians than they spent on the initial excursion. The Embriaci were not great, but their investment in the Crusades was pure greed, not bloodlust. However, at Jerusalem they were willing to be as vicious as needed in order to ingratiate themselves with Godfrey and Raymond.

[20] Primo di Castello, Famillia de Embracio. Born ~1038 CE.

[21] Remember, in my version of cannon-possibility, Niccolò is a nobleman. The Court of Genoa is not large and has never been very massive. It is more unreasonable to think they didn’t know each other than to think they did.

[22] Guglielmo Embracio. Born ~1040 CE.

[23] Again, I’ve not done a great amount of research on the Embriaci Family, but Primo is the one most often credited with the design and construction of the Siege Engines used at Jerusalem. However, I used Primo as Nicky’s childhood confident because I feel they would have both been rather awkward and stand-offish at Court in Genoa, so I needed a way to have Primo confront Nicky here while Guglielmo is otherwise occupied.

[24] Amichetto mio = Modern Italian Diminutive for friend, Primo is literally saying, ‘my little friend’.

[25] Cannibalism is a well-documented atrocity of the Crusades. For the most part, it wasn’t even hidden by the time the longest-serving contingents got to Jerusalem. When fresh forces arrived, there was always an influx of food supplies as well, but they rarely lasted more than a month. Nicolò is at the very edge of plausible belief that what he’s eating is not in some way sourced from a human body, but as he reasons, he DOES have a plausible option to hope that the bone broth is animal (likely horse) bone. And he HAS to focus on that, because to refuse a meal from Primo would have him immediately labeled a traitor and sympathizer (and he’s already in enough trouble).

[26] Peasant Peter Bartholomew supposedly found the Holy Lance (that purportedly pierced the side of Jesus while he hung on the cross) in the St. Peter Basilica at Antioch after Raymond of Toulouse sacked the place. Peter’s ‘vision’ beforehand is recorded to be what motivation spurred Raymond’s final, successful attack on Antioch.

[27] Liturgy of Hours, a Christian regimen of payers at fixed hours. The modern version is abbreviated and only became codified in like the 1970’s, but the long version has been around for centuries, and would certainly been a known staple of a monastic lifestyle in 1099. Depending on which sources you’re reading, there’s 7 or 8 fixed hours in which prayer is required. This would’ve been impossible on a war-campaign, and mostly forgiven to have skipped entirely, but Niccolò’s excuse to Primo for how he spends his time involves squishing the first 4 hours into morning prayers and the last 4 into his evening prayers.

[28] Crazy as it sounds, a good number of people genuinely BELIEVED that killing every living soul inside a city would honestly cleanse it. They believed that killing ‘heathens’ was truly the kindest course of action they could take. If they were killed young, all the better as their souls would bear fewer sins that needed to be wiped away in Purgatory before the Innocent core-spirit could ascend to Heaven. It’s a crazy idea, but many people, Christians and Muslims alike, in this period truly did believe that killing their theological counterparts /saved/ them. Of course, some people, like Primo, simply molded that belief to their already-present enthusiasm for bloodlust, but the line between psycho-killer and earnest-zealot got really blurry in some of these places…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> NEXT TIME: Nicky and Joe team up again! And this time, when they pair up, it's to FINALLY leave the battlefield. Their truce may be uneasy, but at least they stick together!


	6. of Fear & Fury

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Joe & Nicky struggle to understand what "doing the right thing" actually means...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nicky and Joe team up to help evacuate civilians from Jerusalem, so things get pretty bleak. There's also a dramatic (delayed) reaction from Joe regarding Nicky's Genoese origins, one that is a predictable (if unhealthy) response to anguish. But nothing gets TOO squicky...

** Chapter 6: of Fear & Fury **

**:: NICKY ::**

Nicolò gets two weeks, or _nearly_ two.

He’s been inside Jerusalem from the moment he was able to follow his Saracen through the achingly narrow, nearly invisible gap in the ancient fortress’s thick walls.

It had taken three days to figure out where refugees would be able to slip outside unnoticed and escape across the desert plains. It had taken another two days to find refugees who might be willing to trust him and able to manage the journey successfully.

He’d hidden his swords and his crossbow in a cache just outside the walls, and he’d acquired a thin cotton shawl that he could wrap around his head to keep his foreign features from causing too much alarm, but he had the build and gait of a soldier.

People were wary of him, for good reason— even if it stung to remind himself of that.

He managed to find _some_ people willing to trust him.

They were mostly Christians, as those were the people he could communicate with most easily, but they sometimes pulled their Muslim neighbors into trusting him as well. Their friendliness, the natural trust and clear kinship between two or three families of different races and religious creeds… it all made Nicolò more convinced than ever that his purpose here was not to kill the Saracen— no matter how hated a demon Nicolò might think him, Christ said to love thy neighbor and to help those in need whenever he could.

If the unkillable Saracen had been spared, Nicolò could only assume it was by God’s Grace, preserving him to ensure that he and Nicolò could forge the unifying bond between their peoples that they were presumably meant to share… Why else could Nicolò be receiving dream-visions of him and the Saracen man behaving like friends?

Still, in the ten days Nicolò actively uses to cautiously ferry families of refugees out of the Holy City, he carefully avoids the notice of any Saracen patrols and he does not meet _his_ Saracen by any twist of chance.

He does, however, guide more than 30 families to the relative safety of the desert beyond Jerusalem’s walls— helping over 80 people find their way to a better chance at freedom and safety than they’d ever have if they’d remained inside Jerusalem’s holy bounds. He feels good about what he’s done, but he knows it’s not enough.

When the Crusaders breach Jerusalem’s walls, all his worst fears are confirmed.

The brutality is more than he could have ever imagined a good Christian being capable of carrying out. It’s more than he could have imagined being done by even the worst of the heathens they were supposedly meant to purge.

The atrocities line up to make Nicolò want to run.

But, while he is a coward, he is nothing if not devout. This atrocity is one he helped bring upon this city and it is his cross to bear in doing what he can to mitigate the worst of it.

He remains in Jerusalem for 9 days after the Siege is formally concluded. It gets harder and harder to breathe for him, both because the streets run ankle-deep with blood and the stench of rot is unbearable, and because he is forced to hide from his own countrymen.

In those 9 days, he manages to smuggle another 17 families out of the city.

It’s not enough, it could never be enough, and so Nicolò pushes through his exhaustion to continue going back for more.

On the evening of the tenth day, Nicolò hears a woman screaming and charges to investigate. The woman has been pushed to the ground, her body half-bared, by the time Nicolò arrives on the scene. He pulls a bent sword from the nearby rubble to intervene, but he is not the fastest Samaritan to have been summoned by the screaming.

_His_ Saracen steps between the woman and the five crusaders who’d surrounded her— Frenchmen by their shoulders’ insignia.

Nicolò’s counterpart is already bleeding, from some other skirmish, and he looks like he’s set on legs shaking with exhaustion. He could probably still take five Frenchmen, but Nicolò steps up behind them to even the odds anyway.

He whispers a prayer just before the fighting breaks, aware that this moment is a point of change for him from which he will never be able to turn back.

To kill one’s own countrymen, on behalf of the _enemy_ …

Nicolò hates himself almost as much as he hates the men who would think to commit such heinous violence as these ones were planning.

A minute later, maybe two, and Nicolò and his Saracen are the only two left standing in the square. Nicolò nods to the woman, keeping his eyes on his Saracen. The man pants with clear displeasure, and an obvious desire to shout at him with colorful obscenities, but in a moment, he turns away to tend to the frightened woman.

The woman is clearly just as afraid of Nicolò as she was of the men he killed.

The Saracen hushes her, convinces her that Nicolò is, if not a friend, then at least not a demon. She keeps the Saracen between her and Nicolò as she leads them to her Family. There are a dozen people in the hidden storeroom— all starving and desperate.

Too many have glass-eyed stares and all but broken minds.

Nicolò has nothing in his stomach to throw up, but the bile stirs with threat inside him anyway. _He_ did this, his kin and the cause he came to support…

The Saracen speaks to them, gesturing between himself and Nicolò and then out towards the nearest wall of the city. He convinces the extended to let himself and Nicolò help them to escape the slaughter. The children remain quiet, but the glassiness in some of the adults’ stares abates slightly as Nicolò’s companion gives them a fresh breath of hope.

His fiery passion, quick congeniality, and clear determination has inspired them.

Only Nicolò can see how weary the man is, having fought that very passion so often on the battlefield and known it to burn no less than a dozen times more hotly than it does here.

When that family is safely outside of Jerusalem, Nicolò collapses to his knees near the cache of weapons he’d hidden. There’s a small satchel there he’d added with a bit of bread and a water skin, along with a reasonable blanket.

He digs out his supplies with numb fingers.

He cannot face going back inside Jerusalem. Not again.

The horrors are too terrible to stomach and the risk of being recognized has become too great… And he’s killed his own people, now.

He must leave this place before he becomes entirely irredeemable.

The Saracen is beside him as he pulls himself together, staring at the hole in the wall they’d escaped through. He’s trembling as well.

He starts violently when Nicolò taps at his arm, but Nicolò yanks his hand back quick enough to keep every piece of him attached.

The Saracen glares at him, but stands in wait for Nicolò’s explanation.

Without sufficient words between them to make communication easy, and without energy enough to make any real attempt worth the effort, Nicolò simply tips his head towards the road north. He means to aim for Tripoli[1], eventually.

For now, he just wants to get away from Jerusalem.

The Saracen shudders, and then looks like he wants to take the scimitar still in his hand and slice across Nicolò’s throat, but eventually… he _nods_.

Seeing it loosens something vital inside Nicolò’s tight chest.

It means he’s breathing more easily as he turns his back on the man who was his enemy than he had been able to among his countrymen for weeks before things truly fractured.

Nicolò steps into the darkness on the road north of Jerusalem trying to reconcile his doubts and pain and guilt with the certainty he has in the beneficence of God’s Plan.

He doesn’t get far at all in convincing himself of it.

\- - - - -

\- - - - -

**:: JOE ::**

Yusuf _hates_ the Franks. The Byzantines. Whoever else is here, indulging in depravity.

_His_ Frank had proved himself perhaps not _as_ awful as the others, by warning Yusuf of his people’s intentions, but even he is only slightly less than a true demon.

He _has_ to be, to belong to a people this heinous.

Yusuf spends every waking moment convincing people to flee. He only gets a hundred of them out before the bloodbath starts. It makes him sick in the very depths of his soul to see how truly evil these men behave, to stumble upon the results of what horrors they wreak.

He cannot eat, he cannot sleep, all he can do is attempt to help in a futile struggle against the absolute depravity of the Christians.

After the invaders breach the city walls, Yusuf keeps fighting to save as many civilians as he can. It’s an unwinnable battle, but he cannot let himself consider giving up.

Allah will sustain him.

The massacre of the city goes on for days, how many Yusuf doesn’t know.

But on the evening of one of them, Yusuf finds his Frank. He’s in the midst of attempting to defend a woman from rape and eventual murder by five of the Frankish soldiers when _his_ Frank appears in a spray of his comrades’ blood.

Yusuf is thrown so entirely he nearly gets a goring to his gut— _would_ have, but for _his_ Frank’s blade sweeping up to deflect the attack.

They dispatch the remaining would-be rapists in mere moments.

Then Yusuf comforts the distressed woman and spins a story about how he and the Frank are mere traders that got caught in the crossfire— in his story they’d been working together as dear friends before the war and now they are companions is rescuing whomsoever they can find to help.

The woman doesn’t believe him, but she’s more desperate than leaves room for sane decisions. She escorts them back to her Family and then trusts them to lead her Family out of the city— convinces her Family to trust them as well.

The Frank does not betray them.

He even manages to step out and misdirect a patrol of his brethren before they notice the refugees huddled mere feet away behind the next corner.

Another dozen people get out of the city safely.

Yusuf sees them off into the dark and then turns to head back. He freezes as he stares at the foreboding gap that will take him back into the warzone.

He can’t do it, can’t make himself step forward and back into that carnage.

A tap against his arm has him swinging wildly at the threat, but the Frank dodges before any damage is done. Yusuf feels relief to note that, and then he is annoyed at himself for feeling such relief for any enemy who has caused so much evil in this place.

The Frank doesn’t seem offended by his glare.

He doesn’t really seem to even notice it.

Instead of responding to Yusuf’s outburst of emotion, the Frank tips his head… in _invitation_. He’s got a small pack on his shoulder, pulled from a small cache at his feet.

He’s asking Yusuf to join him in abandoning Jerusalem.

Yusuf’s will to return to the city for another round of trying to help people escape death at Frankish hands collapses out from under him.

It’s like all he was waiting for was permission, _anyone’s_ permission, to not have to go back in there again. He couldn’t make himself do it now if his own mother’s life depended on it.

But it’s a different thing to admit that weakness and to _choose_ to accompany the Frank on the road north. Yusuf has a cache of supplies hidden about a day’s walk up that way, one far better stocked than the Frank’s seems to have been, so north seems as good a way to walk as any. Why he decides to _nod_ , to actively stay with whatever creature this man might be, Yusuf can’t hope to explain— not even to himself.

He does, though.

He nods and follows the Frank into the cooling night.

They walk in silence for hours, though dawn is still at least two hours off when the Frank pauses and gestures to a low copse of spindly trees, just a few meters off the road. He mimes going to sleep and then tips his head to Yusuf in question.

Yusuf rolls his eyes, but nods and follows the Frank’s lead.

The pouches on his person offer up only a few dried dates to snack on, their stores having been thoroughly depleted over the last few weeks of constant hustle.

The Frank produces a few small loaves of bread— likely pilfered from someone’s home in Jerusalem. It makes Yusuf sick to think about, but he takes the food when the Frank offers it to him. A small bit of awareness at the back of Yusuf’s mind notes that the Frank only eats a few bites, having saved only a loaf that was little more than two mouthfuls of substance for himself.

Yusuf expects him to pull out another, but he doesn’t.

Instead, he gives a tight smile to Yusuf and then lays down on the hard earth.

He pulls a thin wrap of cloth over him like a blanket and is dead to the world in mere seconds, with his back to a man who has killed him many times before this moment.

Yusuf considers killing him again.

But doing so would take energy that Yusuf no longer feels he can summon.

So, rather than killing the Frank again, Yusuf copies him.

He lays back and arranges his keffiyeh under his head like a pillow. He falls asleep in seconds, and for once is untroubled by chaotic dreams.

A good number of hours later, he’s woken by the Frank.

The man is trying to wake him gently, softly calling, “ _Saracen_.”

Yusuf jolts into muzzy wakefulness with a snarl in the man’s direction. He doesn’t flinch at the vitriol, doesn’t even blink.

It makes Yusuf’s lip curl.

“ ‘ _Saracen’_ , ‘ _Saracen’_ ,” Yusuf grumbles in Sabir, “What it mean, this ‘ _Saracen’_?”

He can guess, by who uses it and how, that it’s not a flattering term.

The Frank blinks, and gestures vaguely at Yusuf.

“All of you,” he says slowly, “The people cast out by Sarah.[2]”

“ ‘Cast out’? From where have I been cast out? And by whom but your people— among whom I would never wish to be cast _in_ with,” Yusuf retorts, tongue still twisting amenably in Sabir though his pace has quickened.

The Frank clearly hasn’t followed most of what he’s said, but he’s gotten enough to realize that, perhaps, his understanding of the Muslims is flawed.

“Who are you, then? If not a Saracen?”

Yusuf snorts, but deigns to give a reply, saying, “I am a Muslim merchant from Tunis, under the Fatimid Caliphate.”

The Frank frowns, but Yusuf can’t tell if it’s because he didn’t expect Yusuf to have a good answer or simply because he didn’t understand the one Yusuf gave.

“What, do you Franks know so little of the world that you don’t know of the Fatimid’s wide-ranging dominion,” Yusuf sniffs snidely.

“I’m not a Frank,” the man says to him, softly— like the statement is a sore.

Yusuf narrows his eyes, ready to cut his tongue out if he tries to distance himself from the crimes of his countrymen by saying he is no longer one of them.

For a moment, he struggles to find the right way to say it in Sabir, spouting bits of nonsense about coming from new-ness and being a son-in-law [3]. Eventually he gives up and spits it in his own language.

“ _Sono… Sono Genovesi_.”

“Genovesi?”

“Hm. Genoa. From Genoa, Liguria,” the not-Frank says with an emphatic nod.

“ _Genoa_?” Yusuf repeats, feeling a renewed depth of fury in him stir itself up to a boil.

Without a further thought, Yusuf launches at him with a dagger from his boot. If this man is from _Genoa_ perhaps Allah kept him alive merely to preserve him for Yusuf to know the full depth of the gift it is for Yusuf to kill him.

Genoa had attacked Mahdia[4] ten years ago, when Yusuf’s father and two older brothers had been in the trade city. His oldest brother had died. His father had been blinded in one eye.

And in the chaos, they’d lost all the goods they’d brought to trade.

It had been a lean three years before they were able to truly recover.

Yusuf shouts as much at the man as he attacks, switching between Arabic, Greek, and Sabir to get his full point across as the grief he still feels for his lost brother overflows. 

The man fights back, staving off a mortal blow to the heart with his own dagger. As Yusuf’s shouting ceases, he lays out his own story—though his sounds absurd.

“Genoa attacked only to stop pirates,” he manages in broken Sabir, repeating it in equally broken Greek. “Preemptive defense!”

“Mahdia is a small trading port, full of mostly kind people,” Yusuf screams back. “She has no pirates in her harbor! And she can summon no army or force to attack anyone!”

That makes the invader frown, his eyes awash with sudden doubt.

He holds back a moment in his attack, asking in cautious Greek, “Your Maghribi people did not attack Genoa for quick collections of Christian gold?”

“Tunis has plenty of gold, we need no more than we can get to the south[5], with easy and cheap trade in salt pulled from the sea,” Yusuf returns in a snarl of Greek words. “What does Genoa have that we could possibly want to go to the trouble of taking?”

The invader’s frown deepens.

His emotive response is so complete it leaves him open to attack.

Yusuf takes advantage.

He gets his dagger into the invader’s heart and murmurs a remembrance prayer for his brother as he watches the light begin to fade from the Genoese man’s too-dramatic eyes.

The light isn’t entirely out, however, as Yusuf lets him sag.

And that proves to be a costly mistake as the man’s dagger slices across Yusuf’s throat.

They die again together in the late-morning shade.

They wake up again, still together, a mere handful of missed-heartbeats later.

They stare at each other across a gaping divide that seems much more uncrossable now than it did when they’d left Jerusalem together.

And yet, Allah has preserved them both.

Their Fates are yet entwined.

Yusuf huffs out an annoyed breath, but he rises with resigned chagrin. “I know where there is more food,” he says heavily, already moving off in the proper direction.

He _feels_ more than hears as the invader falls into step a few strides behind him.

Yusuf has to wonder what he thinks of why their fates are so clearly bound together, and what it means to him that they are seemingly so tightly bound.

If Yusuf didn’t hate him so much, and vice versa, perhaps one of them would be willing to take the risk of a beating to ask what questions must be plaguing both of them.

But Yusuf _does_ hate him.

And if Yusuf is going to bear this discomfiting silence, he just hopes the invader is feeling equally awkward and oppressed in the uncomfortable, persisting quiet.

\- - - - -

**Historical Notes:**

> [1] Tripoli, Lebanon, was mostly spared in the First Crusade as the armies made their way to Jerusalem. Seeing what had happened at Antioch and elsewhere, Tripoli’s leaders basically turned their city over to the Crusaders without a fight and paid them tons of money to stay away. Tripoli remained relatively safe & peaceful until 1102 CE.
> 
> [2] Meaning Sarah, wife of Abraham. It’s an idea of the origins of the term Saracen written well after the actual development of the word (and obviously, it's an idea that's totally inaccurate), but there’s really no good etymological record of where ‘Saracen’ comes from, only that by ~400 CE, the West used it as a catch-all for Arabs. The best legitimate guess we have is that the term is derived from ‘Assyrian’ from the Akkadian ‘Aššur’ and ‘Syria’, Syria being a distinct piece of the area the Romans called Assyria, centered around what we now call the Levant. But the locals didn’t exactly call it Syria, so it’s really no better an explanation than any other, even if the conquests happened long enough ago that some people _did_ call it ‘Syria’, but it’s an abbreviation of a foreignization so…
> 
> [3] Different bits of the word ‘Genovesi’ as put through two fully separating layers of Google Translate (Italian to French to Portuguese to English).
> 
> [4] Known as the Mahdia Campaign, it was a precursor to the First Crusade (prior to both the People’s & the Prince’s Crusade) launched by Genoa, partly in reprisal for ‘Saracen’ pirate attacks, which were likely pirates of unrelated Arab origin, mostly using Corsica as a base but coming from somewhere in the near east (but the Europeans didn’t attempt to see those they called ‘Saracens’ as a large and varied conglomerate of different peoples). 
> 
> [5] Seriously, gold is not a scare resource, pretty much anywhere in the world. It never has been and it still isn't today (every single computer on earth today uses a little bit of gold, including smart phones / watches and car computers, because it's a good conductor and far more abundant than platinum). It’s just shiny and humans like to look at it, so it’s valuable. At most points in History, it’s one of the most common natural resources around (hence why it could be ‘wasted’ in making art and jewelry), particularly for indigenous populations. By the 11th Century in Egypt a camel-sized hunk of gold sold for about 20 pounds of salt in many places (particularly to the East, and even that amount of salt is influenced by the fact that Africa had plenty of Sahara trade routes to salt flats, making salt more undervalued there than anywhere else on earth. In many places, particularly later into the Medieval period, a pound of salt was easily worth 4 to 8 times its weight in gold…).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know I hinted last time that they'd be leaving Jerusalem, and doing so together, but that technically DID happen! These guys are just too much the self-sacrificing idiot to have done it in a reasonable time frame here. Next time, for sure, there will be a lot more 'becoming real friends-ish' things! Stepping stones!
> 
> NEXT TIME: A more congenial accord begins to form between Nicky and Joe, and important conversations are had...
> 
> Also, please note that due to a combination of Life Occurrences and ADD side projects reaching post-readiness, I won't be posting a chapter here next week! I WILL have something else to show you guys, but it's a totally separate story in an entirely different fandom... Yeah, I understand that such news does not inspire confidence in my ability to keep this story running here, but don't worry! I just don't have the hours in the week to /post/ things in addition to writing them. If I start posting instead of writing I WILL run into issues. Right now, I still have a plenty-long queue of chapters to get up here when I can that allows me a safe buffer to keep pace with writing new chapters!
> 
> The outline is finished and I have a good plan of where I'm going, but it's not technically finished yet, so I don't wanna risk getting stuck in a bind. <3 This should be the last week for a LONG while that I have to skip, though, so live in hope!

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you all so much for reading!
> 
> If you wanna scream about these adorable idiots or just wanna chat, find me on Tumblr ( [ @astyle-alex ](https://astyle-alex.tumblr.com/) ) !


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